Backup Raspberry Pi remotely

To back up your raspberry pi remotely, you will need to know the ip address, then using the following command

ssh pi@xx.x.x.xx “sudo dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M | gzip -” | dd of=~/Desktop/pibackup.gz

Replace the xx.x.x.xx with the ip address of your pi, and the final image will be copied to your desktop.

To check from time to time the progress, press “Ctrl + T”, and you will see something like the following:

load: 0.98 cmd: dd 8967 running 0.17u 1.94s
317344+0 records in
317344+0 records out
162480128 bytes transferred in 167.835383 secs (968092 bytes/sec)

To restore the image back you need to restore to SD card

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk#
gzip -dc ~/Desktop/pibackup.gz | sudo dd of=/dev/rdisk# bs=1m conv=noerror,sync