How to backup your Raspberries

raspiBackup is the perfect opensource tool to create backups on Raspberries

Backup your Raspberry regularly and unattended

Install and configure your backup with raspiBackup in 5 minutes. Create a new backup every week and use the grandfather, father and son (GFS) backup rotation scheme to manage your backup versions.

Some Awesome Features

Open source

raspiBackup is published under the GNU license as open source and available for free. But donations are welcome and support further development 😉

For and questions use github discussions and for any bug reports use github issues.

Registration in github is for free. Just use it.

Easy installation with menu driven installer

Install and configure raspiBackup with the major options the same way as raspi-config and create your first backup in just 5 minutes. The installer supports following languages: English, German, Finnish, Chinese and French.

All other more sophisticated options described in the user guide can be configured in a configuration file.

Full and incremental backups

Backuptypes dd and tar create full backups. Backuptype rsync creates incremental backups

Two backup rotation strategies

1) Keep a fixed number of the last backups
2) Use grandfather, father, son rotation strategy (GFS)

Notifications

Get a mail with the backup run messages or use Telegram, Pushover or Slack. The topic has a 🙂 or 🙁 to report success or failure of the backup run. Other smilies inform about other important events like the availability of a new release or a reminder to execute a restore test which should be executed from time to time to verify backup integrity.

All boot modes are supported

1) Boot from SD card only: Both partitions are located on a SD card (any model).
2) Mixed mode: Boot from SD card but use the root partition located on USB device. Required for older Raspberries which don’t support USB boot (2A and 2B).
3) Boot from USB device or SSD (USB boot mode): Both partitions are located on an USB device. Used on newer Raspberries which support USB boot mode (3B, 4B and 400)

Snapshots

Create snapshots with a comment whenever you update your system or install a new system when major changes are planned. If later on something went wrong or even the system becomes unusable restore the previous snapshot and resume updating or installation. Otherwise you have to start from scratch again.

Support on github and other social media channels

Ask questions on github or Facebook. Report issues on github. View videos on Youtube.

News are published on Facebook and Twitter.

Restored backups boot immediately

A restore takes for a system with 8GB approximately 15 minutes on a SD card.

The restored system represents the state of the system when it was saved and will boot up immediately without any manual updates.

Restore backups on Windows

Backuptype dd can be restored on a Windows system with win32diskimager or any other Windows restore tool . tar and rsync backuptypes require a Linux system which can be a Raspberry 🙂

Notifications

Whenever there is a new release or beta available raspiBackup writes a notification message which informs about the new release or beta. Easy upgrade to and downgrade from the new release possible.

Automated regression testsuite

Basic functionality of raspiBackup (backup and restore) for all backup types and backup modes is regression tested to make sure every new release will work reliable as before.

Documentation

User guide, FAQs, configuration examples, NFS configuration on synology, list of error messages and how to get rid of them and much more. Some people already complain about the mass of information. In addition there exists a raspiBackup channel on Youtube

Helper and sample scripts

Various helper scripts are available.

For example use pishrink to compress a dd backup or create a dd backup from a tar or rsync backup and much more.

NVMe storage stupported

NVMe used by Raspberry 5 and compute model 4 (CM4)

Supported operating systems

RaspbianOS
Ubuntu

Easy system transfer from SD card to USB disk or SSD

Just restore a SD card backup on an USB disk or SSD and the system is ready for USB boot.

Extension points for custom logic

Extension points allow to add any custom logic to be executed at various steps in the backup and restore process.

Installation demo


Note: Finnish, French, German and Chinese language support is also available

Let’s go now

and create your first backup in 5 minutes 🙂

Scroll to top