backups for SD card disk image? that don't take up tonnes of space and can be rolled back?

https://lemmy.world/post/18024166

backups for SD card disk image? that don't take up tonnes of space and can be rolled back? - Lemmy.World

I would like to make manual backups of an SD card as a disk image so that it can be easily recreated when needed. I’d like to keep a few versions in case there is a problem I didn’t know about, it can be rolled back. How can I do this incrementally, or with de-duplication, so that I don’t have to keep full copies of the complete SD card? It’s very big but most of the content won’t be changing much. It’s for MiyooCFW [https://github.com/TriForceX/MiyooCFW/releases/tag/2.0.0-beta] ROM which is on FAT 32-formatted micro SD card. Thanks for your help! Also let me know if I am going about the problem in a wrong way.

If it’s a filesystem, it can be backed up using BorgBackup. There are a few different clients but I personally use Vorta on Linux.

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Borg backup has insane deduping. The first time I used it I thought it was broken because of how much smaller the backup was compared to the original. I used it with vorta GUI.

I am not sure how to combine the task of making a disk image with backing up with borg either on the command line or via one of the GUIs?

Easiest way would be to use borg create --read-special --chunker-params fixed,4194304 '/home/user/sdcardbackup::{now}' /dev/sdX (which I copied from the examples in the documentation). I'm not sure if Vorta has a way to activate --read-special but I suspect not; you can most likely still use it to make the repo and manage archives inside of it though.

Backing up from a command/stdin might also be relevant as an alternative, since that lets you back up more or less anything.

borg create — Borg - Deduplicating Archiver 1.4.0 documentation

Wow I love this - I never thought of directly backing up block devices like that.