Linux OS Backup – Pi shrink – Klipper – Chris’s Basement 2024

It is a very, very, bad idea to suggest updating everything as a pre-backup step, for most people that is going to leave the system in an unusable state where the MCU firmware versions mismatch, and that is one of the biggest reasons why MOST people should backup their stuff in the first place, if they find out their MCU's need to be updated and, oh gosh, I forgot how to do it and now my printer is down until I figure it out…if only I could restore from a backup. I understand the logic here but it's super dangerous not to tell people "only update if you are fairly recent and SURE you wont need to flash your MCU's".

Another option is to backup to a Windows machine with a share. Search for "Backup a running Raspberry Pi over the network". Saved my Klipper machines several times.

Just plug a USB drive at least as large as your SD card into the PI. Then use dd to clone it. Job done.

If you have made an effort to install WSL already you do not need any other tools to create compress disk image. You should just put the sd card in a card reader attach it to WSL it should and you should be able to see it as /dev/sdx after ward you just use dd if=/dev/sdx bs=128K status=progress | gzip -c >/path_to_image.gz to restore just use command gunzip -c /path_to_image.gz | dd of=/dev/sdx that all you need to do is

Helpful! You think pi-shrink would work under Cygwin too?