Experiences with raspiBackup to backup openHABian distribution

[godlyblade]

Hey folks,
has anyone experiences with raspiBackup to backup an openHABian smart home system running at RP4?

There are some integrated backup possibilities in openHABian, but nothing seems to me so configurable and straight forward like raspiBackup. I have used raspiBackup some years ago and it worked like a charm on a Raspbian distribution. So I would like to use it again :)

But there are some topics I would like to clarify before.

1. Is it possible to use raspiBackup completely in parallel (background) to my running openHABian system?
2. Which processes do I have to stop before the backup and restart afterwards?
3. In this documentation it tells me:

NO Do-It-Yourself mirroring
Note you must NOT use dd or any other tool such as 'Win32 disk imager' to copy an SD card or partition on your own. If you do and boot with source and destination cards plugged in, they will have the same partition IDs and this will likely mess up things and can irreversibly devastate your whole system. Use the blkid command in shell to see those IDs. This also means you must not take mirrors of the mirror. Also be aware that only the first two partitions are mirrored - the storage (3rd) partition will never be mirrored even if you have set that up for use as your backup area.

So does this mean I can not use raspiBackup at all?

It would be great if someone could give me a short reply, maybe some of you are also using openHABian? :)

Best Regards!

[framps]

I know there are openHab users who use raspiBackup successfully. But I don't have any details. Anyhow I don't recommend to use dd. Use rsync if possible and tar otherwise.

I suggest to ask this question in an openHAB forum or in one of the available github repositories.

Please cross link to any thread or issue you create and share that way the information you get how to use raspiBackup and openHab .

[godlyblade]

Thanks for the fast reply! I have created a new discussion. Unfortunately not in GitHub, because there is no Discussions tab in the openHABian project...

Can you please give me a hint, why you don't prefer to use dd backups? I used it together with pishrink in the past and it worked perfectly within Raspbian. With dd backup I'm able to restore my whole system just with my Mac and an USB Card reader. I don't need anything else, it's really fast and even my other family members are able to do this without any Linux / Raspberry (ssh etc.) knowledge. That's a really important scenario for home automatization topics) :)

So are there any advantages of rsync backup I don't see right now in this context or is the rsync backup just your favorite?

NO Do-It-Yourself mirroring
Note you must NOT use dd or any other tool such as 'Win32 disk imager' to copy an SD card or partition on your own. If you do and boot with source and destination cards plugged in, they will have the same partition IDs and this will likely mess up things and can irreversibly devastate your whole system. Use the blkid command in shell to see those IDs. This also means you must not take mirrors of the mirror. Also be aware that only the first two partitions are mirrored - the storage (3rd) partition will never be mirrored even if you have set that up for use as your backup area.

In my interpretation, this quote just tells me to be aware not to plug in both SD cards together (source / destination). But this should not be the case if I create a dd backup on an external SSD.

[framps]

Here I explain why I suggest not to use dd.

rsync is a incremental backup and much faster than a full backup with dd or tar. That way your outage of openHAB is much shorter if you stop openHAB before the backup.

[godlyblade]

Gotcha 👍

Let‘s see what the openHABian guys tell me regarding the processes I have to stop. Afterwards I will do some tests how long it takes.