question

Hello,

I wrote a script that backup the whole SD card to a SMB/CIFS share. It's a lot more data (depending on you SD card size) than backing up only the /data folder.

If you are able to mount a SFTP folder to the local system, than you can use my script also with SFTP.

In case of restore you just have to flash the image to the SD card and you are good.

Here is the link: https://github.com/mr-manuel/raspberry-pi-backup

There are a couple of small issues with your script.

Firstly, It doesn't copy the mount.cifs file correctly into the /sbin folder under VenusOS. Looks like it isn't looking into the correct folder.

error:

cp: can't stat '/data/etc/ext/mount.cifs': No such file or directory

Once I manually did that and changed the attributes, I was able to mount the shared folder correctly. Secondly, I had to remove the '/' at the end of the BACKUP_SUBFOLDER="Backups/" subfolder in the script because it was trying to add it in twice. Once I got that sorted out, your script started working pretty much as expected but, I am getting another error that says: Unable to find suitable address

However, I can manually run the commands and get things to work.

Thank you and much appreciated. I am now able to do a backup remotely to my system without having to remove the micro SD card in the raspberry pi to my NAS. This will be super helpful if/when I have a system failure without having to do a complete system install from scratch.

For some reason the backup is extremely slow but I'm thinking that it has more to do with the built it wifi of the raspberry pi than it does with anything else. I'm only getting speeds of 239 kB/s for some reason.

Yes, /data stores all configuration items. In fact in it's stock configuration /root is read only and not changed during operation. Backing up all of /data will probably work as long as you are restoring to the same system with the same I/O configurations as when the backup was made.

There are also some things modified in /u-boot (the /boot partition) that you'd need to restore for complete functionality: config.txt, cmdline.txt and any overlays added to the system

You would not want to replace /data in a working system however, so your concept of doing the restore with the SD card on another system is a good approach.

The GuiMods backup/restore does not save settings that are based on serial numbers, device names or other things that might change. Victron experimented with a mechanism to backup the entire settings database but had problems, I assume in this same area.

This is for the linux machine you will back TO, not for the GX device! You will pull a backup, not push!

Save this to /etc/cron.daily/rsync-gx and chmod 755 the file

#!/bin/sh
sshpass -p "CerboPassword" rsync -avL -e "ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no" root@10.0.0.50:/data/ /var/backups/einstein/

Replace CerboPassword with the ssh password of your GX device
Replace 10.0.0.50 with the IP of your GX device
Replace /data/ with any directory you like to sync
Replace /var/backups/einstein/ with a local directory you want to sync to

Now every day you get a backup on to the device the cronjob runs on.