Generated .img very big...

[JoostDkr]

My RaspberryPi has a sd-card of 16Gb.
I went through the raspiBackupInstallUI and started manualy raspiBackup by "sudo raspiBackup m- detailed".
The raspiBackup generates a .img of 31Gb. That's almost twice of the sd-card. :-(
raspiBackup.log

Does someone know how I can get a small image?

[framps]

According this line

20241006-155935 DBG 2561: --- LC_ALL=C dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M of="/media/pi/rpi-backup/@HOSTNAME@/@HOSTNAME@-dd-backup-20241006-155926/@HOSTNAME@-dd-backup-20241006-155926.img"

You SD card is saved.

According

20241006-161155 DBG 5739:                          Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
20241006-161155 DBG 5739:                          /dev/root        15G  9.0G  4.7G  66% /
20241006-161155 DBG 5739:                          devtmpfs        776M     0  776M   0% /dev
20241006-161155 DBG 5739:                          tmpfs           937M     0  937M   0% /dev/shm
20241006-161155 DBG 5739:                          tmpfs           937M   22M  915M   3% /run
20241006-161155 DBG 5739:                          tmpfs           5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
20241006-161155 DBG 5739:                          tmpfs           937M     0  937M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
20241006-161155 DBG 5739:                          /dev/mmcblk0p1  253M   49M  204M  20% /boot
20241006-161155 DBG 5739:                          log2ram          60M   45M   16M  75% /var/log
20241006-161155 DBG 5739:                          tmpfs           188M     0  188M   0% /run/user/1000
20241006-161155 DBG 5739:                          /dev/sdc1        60G   30G   30G  50% /media/pi/rpi-backup

Your SD card has about 16GB.

So the dd backup should be exactly 16GB. How did you verify the backup is 31GB?

According

--- RBK0159I: 2 backups kept for dd backup type. Please be patient.

you keep two backups and your backup directory will use 32GB. Maybe you checked the size of used backupspace by error instead of the size of the dd backup? Used ls -lah <BACKUPDIR> to verify.

Anyhow I detected

20241006-155931 DBG 5736:                          /dev/mmcblk0p1: LABEL_FATBOOT="boot" LABEL="boot" UUID="9F2D-0578" TYPE="vfat" PARTUUID="5e3da3da-01"
20241006-155931 DBG 5736:                          /dev/mmcblk0p2: LABEL="rootfs" UUID="efc2ea8b-042f-47f5-953e-577d8860de55" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="5e3da3da-02"
20241006-155931 DBG 5736:                          /dev/sdc1: LABEL="rpiBackup" UUID="7A2A-57A5" TYPE="exfat" PARTUUID="5e3da3da-01"
20241006-155931 DBG 5736:                          /dev/mmcblk0: PTUUID="5e3da3da" PTTYPE="dos"

/dev/sdc1 has the same PARTUUID as /dev/mmcblk0p1. I strongly recommend to change the PARTUUID of /dev/sdc1 because identical PARTUUIDs on different devices connected to a system can create unexpected behaviour and bad headache 😉

[JoostDkr]

Thanks for your analysis.

I have changed the PARTUUID.
pi@Raspberrypi-2:~ $ lsblk -o NAME,LABEL,RM,SIZE,TYPE,MOUNTPOINT,PARTUUID
NAME LABEL RM SIZE TYPE MOUNTPOINT PARTUUID
sda 1 59.5G disk
└─sda1 rpiBackup 1 59.5G part /media/pi/rpi-backup 9991f7ef-1968-4ca3-8f6d-0e9b0a8d2b06
mmcblk0 0 29.7G disk
├─mmcblk0p1 boot 0 256M part /boot 5e3da3da-01
└─mmcblk0p2 rootfs 0 14.6G part / 5e3da3da-02

Notice: The sd-card mmcblk0 = 29.5G. The total of partitions mmcblk0p1 and mmcblk0p2 are only about 16G.
It look like raspiBackup makes a backup of the whole sd-card instead of only the used partitions mmcblk0p1 and mmcblk0p2.

sudo ls -lsh /media/pi/rpi-backup/Raspberrypi-2/Raspberrypi-2-dd-backup-20241007-080340
total 30G
30G -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 30G Oct 7 08:15 Raspberrypi-2-dd-backup-20241007-080340.img
128K -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 80K Oct 7 08:16 raspiBackup.log
128K -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2.6K Oct 7 08:16 raspiBackup.msg

I have search for unexpected tings in the logfile. This is what I found:

chown: changing ownership of '/media/pi/rpi-backup/Raspberrypi-2/Raspberrypi-2-dd-backup-20241006-225821/raspiBackup.msg': Operation not permitted

RaspiBackup.docx

[framps]

mmcblk0 0 29.7G disk
├─mmcblk0p1 boot 0 256M part /boot 5e3da3da-01
└─mmcblk0p2 rootfs 0 14.6G part / 5e3da3da-02

Your SD card has 29.7 GB and partition 2 has 14.6 GB only.

Keep in mind a dd backup saves the whole SD card. Read FAQ 16 how to save 16GB only. Or use tar or rsync.

[JoostDkr]

Ok thanks. I understand in FQA-16 that the configuration parameter DEFAULT_DD_BACKUP_SAVE_USED_PARTITIONS_ONLY can be set to backup only the 2 partitions. I found in raspiBackup.sh/line 2773 this parameter and changed it to "DEFAULT_DD_BACKUP_SAVE_USED_PARTITIONS_ONLY=1" (Is this the right way?)
running sudo raspiBackup -m detailed still gives an image of 31Gb. :-(
raspiBackup.log

[framps]

Is this the right way?

Unfortunately not. Don't modify the code and revert your change. Then edit /usr/local/etc/raspiBackup.conf and update the current setting from DEFAULT_DD_BACKUP_SAVE_USED_PARTITIONS_ONLY=0
to
DEFAULT_DD_BACKUP_SAVE_USED_PARTITIONS_ONLY=1
and try again.

[JoostDkr]

Pffff, Jeah.... It works. :-)
Thanks for supporting, developing, and sharing this tool.

For consideration; it is not useful to have "DEFAULT_DD_BACKUP_SAVE_USED_PARTITIONS_ONLY=1" as default? Saves a lot of space and the image fits on sd-cards where it didn't fit anymore (Not
every sd-card of the same size have he same size!)

[framps]

You're right but usually everybody uses all space for the second partition and doesn't know it's possible to save backup space with dd if not all the space is used. I documented in FAQ 16 and the raspiBackup option page how to reduce the backup space to make raspiBackup users who use dd aware there is a way to reduce the backup space.

I frankly don't suggest to use dd but there are reasons why raspiBackup users want to have a dd backup and that's why it's supported 😉 .