I know I’ve posted about this myself about a year ago and maybe it was only about doing ‘a single’ backup because I had ‘a single’ backup from Sept 2019 for my weather station Pi… which is about 6 months old. So after struggling for a good 4 hours trying to restore/fix the partition part of the microSD card I eventually gave up and luckily had a backup to restore to get it going quickly again.
The fact that the image backup was 6 months old means that additional services I had added needed to be added back in the config (this was quick) but I have lost all the stored weather stats that I would use for comparison and reporting between Sep 2019 and April 2020 (OK it is luckily uploaded to various weather services sites but still I have no local graph history).
It could be a lot worse but I’ve now set a reminder to do a full image backup once a month (it takes around 15 to 20 minutes). Worst case I lose a month’s data but a restore to a band new card will be much quicker. I know I set one or more Pi’s to swap temp files to RAM but can’t remember which – point is nothing beats a full backup.
See Backing up and Restoring your Raspberry Pi’s SD Card
As with all computers, it is a good idea to back up your Raspberry Pi’s SD (or microSD) card from time to time; I’m just going to call them ‘SD cards’ from here on. This is especially true when you first get a pre-installed card from a retailer or friend. You will need a second computer, or a second Raspberry Pi opera