Recently
I had to repeat installation of my Raspberry Pi 3 server. Probably
because of some SD card corruption problem I started experiencing
unexpected loss of active services, first GitLab then MiniDLNA, a and
failures while trying reinstalling or reconfiguring them. I so
downloaded latest Raspbian image and went with a complete
installation. Not a big deal, since I’ve been following my
own instructions on this blog but still a time consuming process.
Once
the Raspberry server was operative again I started looking for a
simple backup solution in the case something broke again by itself
or, not unlikely, I broke something by myself.
I
quickly found in the Internet this
discussion page where, among other solutions, it was proposed a
handy shell script to completely backup Raspberry SD Card. Following
discussion links I landed on this
GitHub page where the same script is available in its latest
version.
Installation
Installing
the script is just matter of downloading and unzipping it or, as
alternative, cloning it with git command. I did choose the latter
since I’m going to need git in future.
sudo apt-get install gitmkdir scriptcd script/git clone https://github.com/aweijnitz/pi_backup.git
configuring
the script
The
PI backup script is a fine example of shell programming, it needs
only a couple of arrangements to fit the system where is installed.
First
functions stopServices()
and startServices
must be edited by uncommenting commands to stop and start services
running on the Raspberry. I added command to stop and start MiniDLNA
service:
...sudo service minidlna stop...sudo service minidlna start...
Then
I edited the backup path. In the same scrip section it’s possible
to set the number of old backups to keep and if backed-up images must
be compressed.
...# Setting up directoriesSUBDIR=backupMOUNTPOINT=/media/usbdiskDIR=$MOUNTPOINT/$SUBDIRRETENTIONPERIOD=1 # days to keep old backupsPOSTPROCESS=0 # 1 to use a postProcessSucess function after successfull backupGZIP=0 # whether to gzip the backup or not...
