Issues out of nowhere

[pfeerick]

Thanks, yea I want it as more of a full restore.  So in theory using dd I could make the of= point to a network mounted drive so I always have a restore image.  Will dd work on the microsd card if its actively mounted?

@fsa317: Yes, but as evilbunny said, if mounted read-only. However, imaging a live system is a good recipe for disaster when you try to restore from it...

I personally would do a blend... Spin up a new image, do the bulk of your configuration and then image it. That's your full reasonably clean backup base image and a bootable restore point. Then use rsnapshot to do the incremental and differential backups of data files. Then when the time comes, you can either restore from that backup image, and then pull across the backups from rsnapshot, or you can use a completely different base image, and pull the data across still. Best of both worlds.

@evilbunny: Yeah, hence why tried to pointed out rsnapshot was for data files, not bootable media I fully agree though, it's the better option for automated data backups. There's always zerofree if you're picky about empty space, but pxz seems to do a good job so far of squishing the images of even SBCs that have been running for a couple of years...