sd - Raspberry Pi image maker

Easily make compressed images of your Raspberry Pi.
Easily restore images to an SD card.
Restore an image-file from an sd card.
Backup an image-file to an sd card.
Works entirely on a Raspberry Pi in terminal. No Windows or Mac needed.
Creates a compressed image-file that will resize to fill the new card it is put on (thanks to PiShrink).
Supports .img .zip .xz and .gz file formats.
Supports all USB storage.
Supports USB boot (tries to hide the boot disk).

SETUP

Install Raspberry PI OS on an SD card that is large enought to hold some SD image-files. 32GB or 64GB will do. This is your Master SD-card.
Install sd as described below.
You will need a USB-SD reader for your source SD-card.
You will need some SD cards. Use as small of an SD-card as you can because the entire card has to be read in before it is shrunk and compressed. I have been using Sandisk Industrial 8GB cards.

TO MAKE AN IMAGE FILE

Boot your Pi to your Master SD-card as above.
Put your source SD-card in the USB SD reader and insert it in a Pi USB port.
Open a terminal window.
Change to the 'Downloads' folder (optional).

cd Downloads

Type in the command below to see the name of the SD-device. If it is the only one in, it should be 'sda'.

 sd list

Type in the command below to start reading the SD-card to an image-file

  sd read

Follow the prompts to enter the SD-device name (probably 'sda') and the image-file-name you want to use.
Watch your image-file get created!

INSTALL

In a terminal window, type in

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RichardMidnight/sd/main/sd
bash sd install   


beta ver 

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RichardMidnight/sd/main/sd-beta
bash sd-beta install

EXAMPLES

List available SD-cards and image-files

 sd list

To create an image-file from your SD-card in 'sda'

 sd read sda newimage.zip

To write an image-file to an SD-card in 'sda'

sd write newimage.zip sda

SAMPLE SESSION CREATING AN IMAGE FILE

This was all automatic except for the initial command 'sd read sda newimage' and answering 'y'.

It took 12 minutes to create an image from an 8GB SD-card on a Raspberry Pi 4. The image compressed to 1.6GB

pi@RaspberryPi-Master:~/Downloads $ sd read sda newimage
Copyright (c) 2018-2020 Richard Reed
sd imager v1.5.10
Checking to see if required tools are installed ...[OK]

Read SD card
SD card = 'sda SanDisk SDDR-B531 7.4G'
Checking for SD card over 16GB ...          ' 7.4G' [OK]
Checking for enough space on the drive ...  '13G' [OK]
Adding .zip extension...
Image file = 'newimage.zip'
Checking for supported file extension ...   'zip' [OK]

Create image-file 'newimage.zip' from '/dev/sda' [y,N] ?y

Step 1 - Reading SD card to newimage.img ...
Tue 05 Jan 2021 12:33:32 PM EST
7.4G to read
7948206080 bytes (7.9 GB, 7.4 GiB) copied, 291 s, 27.3 MB/s
1895+0 records in
1895+0 records out
7948206080 bytes (7.9 GB, 7.4 GiB) copied, 293.14 s, 27.1 MB/s
Done reading SD card
7.5G newimage.img
Step 1 took 4 min 58 sec

Step 2 - Shrinking filesystem with PiShrink ...
pishrink.sh v0.1.2
pishrink.sh: Gathering data ...
Creating new /etc/rc.local
pishrink.sh: Checking filesystem ...
rootfs: 110650/460288 files (0.2% non-contiguous), 894551/1873920 blocks
resize2fs 1.44.5 (15-Dec-2018)
pishrink.sh: Shrinking filesystem ...
resize2fs 1.44.5 (15-Dec-2018)
Resizing the filesystem on /dev/loop0 to 952788 (4k) blocks.
Begin pass 2 (max = 221227)
Relocating blocks             XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Begin pass 3 (max = 58)
Scanning inode table          XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Begin pass 4 (max = 9374)
Updating inode references     XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
The filesystem on /dev/loop0 is now 952788 (4k) blocks long.

pishrink.sh: Shrinking image ...
pishrink.sh: Shrunk newimage.img from 7.5G to 3.9G ...
Done shrinking filesystem
3.9G newimage.img
Step 2 took 2 min 5 sec

Step 3 - Compressing newimage.img to newimage.zip ...
Compression level set to -1 out of -9
[   0/3.8G]   adding: newimage.img ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... (deflated 59%)
Done compressing newimage.img to newimage.zip
1.6G newimage.zip
Step 3 took 5 min 22 sec

7.4G SD card compressed to 3981M in 12 min 25 sec
You can rename newimage.zip, but it is highly recomended to leave the extension as '.zip'.
You can remove the SD card in /dev/sda now.
pi@RaspberryPi-Master:~/Downloads $

RichardMidnight / sd