Strategy 3 – Making SD card backups

Git and SFTP are great for keeping code safe, but they don't help you reinstall and reconfigure Raspberry Pi OS on a card. The procedures for Windows, Linux, and macOS are quite different for this. The basic idea is to insert the SD card and use a tool to clone the whole card to a file known as an image, which you can restore with balenaEtcher when you need recovery.

Important note

You should only restore images to cards of the same size or larger. Putting an image on a smaller device is likely to fail to write, creating a corrupt SD card.

Before we begin, properly shut down your Raspberry Pi, take out its SD card, and put that into your computer. These clean images are large, so do not put them in your Git repository. It's beyond the scope of this chapter, but I recommend finding a way to compress these files as they are mostly empty right now. In all cases, expect this operation to take 20-30 minutes due to the image...