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Raspberry Pi OS Backup and Restore

Operating System Images

Operating systems for the Raspberry Pi computer are distributed as ISO files. Choose one of the following options:

  1. Install everything from scratch, starting from a clean Raspberry Pi OS image.
  2. Flash a system image with all software components pre-installed, from a system snapshot.

Raspberry Pi OS

Use the Raspberry Pi Imager to flash a clean Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit Lite image, as explained in the RPi OS installation guide.

Alternatively, download the Raspberry Pi OS ISO from the official website, and flash it to a micro SD card.

System Snapshot

Custom system images are uploaded to Google Drive, but are not kept up-to-date.

Download an ISO using the links below:

Warning

These images do not have the latest versions of OLA's software, and the upgrade path is undocumented. You may instead try starting from scratch.

After the download completes, flash it to a micro SD card.

Next steps

Depending on the image you flahsed:

  • Snapshot install (i.e. from our ISO) proceed to the electronics setup guide directly.
    • Optionally check if the filesystem has expanded with df -h (pishrink images only). If not expanded, reboot the Pi. It may take a couple reboots.
  • Clean Raspberry Pi OS, install all required software first, as explained in the software setup guide.

Utilities

Backup OS image

Note: extra details at raspberrypi.org archive.

Details at: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/linux/filesystem/backup.md

Using dd and gunzip

To create the compressed filesystem backup, we used:

# Replace "sda" with your SD card's actual device name (you may use "lsblk" to find it).
sudo dd bs=4M status=progress if=/dev/YOUR_SD_CARD_DEVICEYOUR_SD_CARD_DEVICE | gzip > pipettin_pi.img.gz
sync

Uncompressed (very large) images can be saved as well:

# Replace "sda" with your SD card's actual device name (you may use "lsblk" to find it).
sudo dd bs=4M status=progress if=/dev/YOUR_SD_CARD_DEVICE of=pipettin_pi.img
sync

PiShrink images

A system image can be automatically shrunk using PiShrink. The main benefit is that the filesystem is also shrunk, so it can be used in SD cards smaller than the original.

The image will "auto-expand" to fill the new SD card during the first boot of the Pi, in a way similar to regular RPi OS images.

First install PiShrink on your system: https://github.com/Drewsif/PiShrink?tab=readme-ov-file#installation

You may then use the following commands to make a backup and shrink the image:

# Do a compressed backup before shrinking, just in case!
gzip -k pipettin_pi.img

# Shrink the image with PiShrink.
sudo pishrink.sh pipettin_pi.img

# Compress the shrunk image, for sharing.
zip pipettin_pi.img.zip pipettin_pi.img