Tips for large SD cards, HDDs and SSDs

When raspiBackup was created, there were only small SD cards and disks. SSDs were still a luxury and also small. Nowadays, the SD cards are tens of GB in size and the disks and SSDs have tens of TB.

In raspiBackup Release 0.7, new features were therefore introduced to help minimize backup and restore times for large devices. For this purpose, the partition-oriented mode is to be used and not the normal mode, as this only supports 2 partitions. The assumption is that the first two partitions house the OS and other large partitions are used for data.

In partition-oriented mode, you can select which partitions are to be backed up and which partitions are to be restored (option -T). This allows you to regularly back up only the first two partitions on which the OS is located in a very short time. The other large partitions, which are used for data, can be backed up separately at other times when fast backups are not required. If the system does not boot, only the first two system partitions have to be restored.

It is even faster if the option -00 is used when restoring an rsync backup. Then the partitions are not reformatted and the complete partitions are not restored, but only the changes that have occurred in the meantime are restored via rsync. In this way, you can quickly restore individual partitions to the state they had at the time of the backup. Of course, this only works if the device of the original system and the file system are not defective. Otherwise, a complete long restore must be carried out.

If you want to make full use of devices > 2TB, mbr2gpt from RonR can be used toi convert the system from mbr to gpt.