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Work in progress

This documentation is being built with new tools on a new platform...

Initially by copying the original text from framp's website.

Currently the structure isn't finalized and most pages are empty or "broken", especially regarding links and formatting. The German version is more complete yet.

That means: For now it's work in progress.

There are two language versions, german and english. Dynamically selectable with the language selector on the top right.

Introduction

raspiBackup - Create backup versions of your Raspberry Pis regularly/automatically.

A regular backup of your Raspberry Pis is important. In case of a failure of the system device (SD Card, USB disk, USB flash drive, SSD, NVMe ...) or unintended updates which cause the system either not to boot any more or boot with errors this backup enables you to restore a previous functional backup.

raspiBackup creates a backup of Raspberry Pis from a running system. You can either start the backup manually or have the backups be started automatically with systemd or crontab. Optionally you can let you notified about the backup result with eMail, Pushover, Slack or Telegram.

Backups can be saved ony an partition which can be mounted on a Linux system (USB flash drive, USB disk, SSD, NVMe, nfs, samba/cifs, sshfs, webdav etc).

There exist two backup modes: The normal backup mode just saves the boot and root parition. If additional partitions should be saved, for example a 3rd data only partition, the partition oriented mode has to be used.

If you own an Synology or another NAS device see here for configuration hints.

Linux backuptools dd backup, tar backup, (both backups can also be zipped) and a rsync backup with hardlink usage to create a delta backup can be used. For details about the different backup methods see here. There you will find a decision tree to decide which backup methods is the right one to use.

To install and configure raspiBackup there exists an installer similar to raspi-config, which allows menuedriven, simple and fast to configure raspiBackup with it's most important options to use raspiBackup. All more sophisticated options have to be configured in a configuration file.

raspiBackup also restores a backup Restore.

All functions and usage scenarios of raspiBackup are listed in Functionoverview..

For additional chapters see here:

Supported hard- and software

See Supported hard- and software

Stop and start of services

To get a consistent backup of a running system all services which keep important information in memory have to be stopped before a backup starts and should be started when the backup finishes,

The required commands can be specified in the configuration file. The raspiBackup installer allows to select systemd services to be stopped and started and no configuration file update is required.

Extensionpoints

There exist extensionpoints for plugins in raspiBackup, to hock in any additonal custom logic at different points of the backup and restore processing.

Optionally external root partition

If an old Raspberry should be seaved which doesn't support USB boot an external root partition referred by the SD boot partition will be saved also.

There exists the normal backup mode which just saves /boot and /root. Partition oriented mode saves any number of partitions starting with release 0.6.6.

Introduction video on Youtube-Channel

There exists a Introductional video for raspiBackup on Youtube.

Topics are

  • Present raspiBackup with its features
  • Present the most important webpages about raspiBackup
  • Introduction of github as a question and problemreporting tools
  • Liveinstallation of raspiBackup with the menuedriven installer

All slides used in the videos can be downloaded from hier.

A lot of additional videos about various features of raspiBackup are available in the raspiBackup-Channel.

Contact

  • Click Github questions or [Github issues to ask questions or report issues for raspiBackup. That's my preference to get in contact.

  • Click Facebook, to follow raspiBackup on facebook

  • Click Twitter, to follow raspiBackup on twitter

  • Click Youtube, to visit the raspiBackup channel on Youtube

  • Click RaspberryForum, to ask questions in the German Raspberry forum. If you're not a native German speaker you can post your question in English if you like.

  • Click Reddit, to follow raspiBackup on Reddit.

Hinweis

Any other communication channels like eMail which is quite prominent will be discarded silently.

Donations

Any recognition of raspiBackup development- and maintenance effort and any support is greatly appreciated. There exist following donation alternatives:

  1. Become a github sponsor
  2. Paypal: The eMail framp att linux-tips-and-tricks dott de is known by PayPal and everybody who owns a Paypal account can donate to this eMail.
  3. Neither one: Just contact me via eMail mentioned above and we will find a solution. For example I already received multiple times donations in a good old postal letter :-)

Credits

raspiBackup wouldn't have the features and quality without folks from the community who asked for features and helped to test new features and created PRs to add new featutures. Ths list will be very long and I was very busy to update the list in the past. I finally stopped to publish and update the list.

Thank you very much to everybody who helped to improve raspiBackup !

The code of raspiBackup is pure bash code and is available under the GPL license on github.

Disclaimer

This backupscript raspiBackup was initally created for personal use only. But it's very useful and therefore was published for general use. It's seriously tested but it's not possible to guarantee the script works as expected in all possible environments. Everybody uses this script on his own risk. The creator of this script is not liable in any case for any malfunction.