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jannegpriv/sd_card_handling_raspberry_on_mac.md

Last active February 7, 2020 14:35
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SD card handling for Raspberry PI on MAC
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sd_card_handling_raspberry_on_mac.md

Backing up Raspberry Pi SD Cards on Mac OS X

  1. Insert the SD card into a USB card reader, and plug it into your Mac

  2. Open Terminal.app and use the following command to list the disks attached to your Mac and identify which /dev/disk corresponds to the SD card (look for the disk that includes a partition of type Linux):

diskutil list

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk3

  1. Having found the identifier of the SD card, use the dd command to backup the SD card. For the case where the SD card is on /dev/disk3, the command is:

sudo dd if=/dev/rdisk3 of=/path/to/backup.img bs=1m

Notice that the dd command refers to /dev/rdisk, rather than /dev/disk. Some of the differences between these two ways of accessing a disk on Mac OS X are explained here, but the upshot is that the dd copying process is much faster if you use /dev/rdisk to access your SD card, rather than /dev/disk.

  1. To restore an SD card from a backup use the following command:

sudo dd if=/path/to/backup.img of=/dev/rdisk3 bs=1m

  1. It’s also possible to create compressed SD card backups as follows:

sudo dd if=/dev/rdisk3 bs=1m | gzip > /path/to/backup.img.gz

Restore from a compressed backup as follows:

gzip -dc /path/to/backup.img.gz | sudo dd of=/dev/rdisk3 bs=1m

Check progress:

Ctrl-t

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