12 April 2020

Restoring your RPi

As I’ve said before, the data running on your RPi is only as good as it’s last backup. You have already backed up your RPi, right?

This article is going to cover how to restore the backup image of your RPi with Windows. While can also restore it using Linux or MacOS, I’m not going to cover those as I primarily use the Windows Operating System. If you desire more info on the RPi backup/restore process, please consult the official documentation here.

Restore on Windows

In Windows, we’ll use a utility called “Win32 Disk Imager”. If you followed my previous article on backing up your RPi you should already have it installed. If you haven’t, please go download and install Win32 Disk Imager onto your computer. It is this software that will allow us to restore the full image copy we made back to the micro-SD card of your RPi.

On your Windows computer, open the Win32 Disk Imager program.

In the upper right, under ‘Device’, select the drive letter of the card reader.
Mine is “D:\”, your will likely be different.

In the ‘Image File’ box, click on the folder button to browse to, and select, the location of your backup image file, which you’d like to restore.

Click the ‘Write’ button at the button to begin restoring your backup image.
There will be a popup message that warns about writing to the device, click ‘Yes’ and it will begin your restore

Once the restore completes, there will be a popup message stating that the write is complete that you need to click ‘OK’ to.

Your restore is now complete!

Go ahead and eject the card from your card reader and return it to your RPi. You can then reconnect the power and turn it back on. Everything should be there, exactly as it was at the time you made the backup.

Category: Backups, Linux, RaspberryPi, Raspbian | LEAVE A COMMENT
12 April 2020

Backing up your RPi

Like any other computer system, the data running on your RPi is only as good as it’s last backup. Heck, have you ever even backed-up your RPi since you got it up and running? Well let me show you how to get backed-up so that you can get back up in the event that you ever have a RPi catastrophe.

This article is going to focus on backing up your RPi with Windows. While can also back it up using Linux or MacOS, I’m not going to cover those as I primarily use the Windows Operating System. If you desire more info on backing up your RPi, please consult the official documentation here.

Backup on Windows

In Windows, we’ll use a utility called “Win32 Disk Imager”. Go ahead and download and install Win32 Disk Imager onto your computer. It will allow us to make a full image copy of the micro-SD card that is used in our RPi. That way we can restore a 1:1 image of that micro-SD card as it is at the time of backup, back onto the card or onto a new card if we ever need to. We can keep that image copy on a desktop or NAS or cloud storage.

Start by shutting down the RPi with the following command.

sudo shutdown now

One the RPi has shut down, disconnect the power. You can now pull the micro-SD card out of it. Place it into the the card reader on your Windows computer. This might be a usb adapter that you are using, or there might be a SD slot on your laptop that will take a “micro-SD to SD card” adapter.

On your Windows computer, open the Win32 Disk Imager program.

In the upper right, under ‘Device’, select the drive letter of the card reader.
Mine is “D:\”, your will likely be different.

In the ‘Image File’ box, click on the folder button to browse to, and select, the location of where you would like to save the image file to.

Click the ‘Read’ button at the button to begin creating your backup image.

Once the backup completes, there will be a popup message you need to click ‘OK’ to.

Your backup is complete!

Go ahead and eject the card from your card reader and return it to your RPi. You can then reconnect the power and turn it back on.

You can now restore you RPi to this point-in-time image when anything ever goes wrong in the future.

Category: Backups, Linux, RaspberryPi, Raspbian | LEAVE A COMMENT
4 December 2019

ReFS allocation size

I was reformatting a drive for some Veeam backups and was trying to recall what I had set the ReFS allocation unit size to when I initially setup the drive. Well, I could not remember to save my life. Luckily, with a little command line action, it’s easy enough to find out what it was set it to.

The command line tool to use is fsutils. To see what options are available to us when using fsutils, we can run the following command.fsutils fsinfo /?

Using “E:/” as the drive we are checking out, we can run the following line to discover information about the volume itself. fsutil fsinfo volumeinfo E:

To view the specific ReFS info on this drive, we can run the following line. fsutil fsinfo refsinfo E: Take a look at value for the “Bytes Per Cluster”, this is where we can see that when this drive was formatted, it’s allocation unit size was set to 65k. 65k is also the recommended setting for Veeam destinations if you are using ReFS.

Category: Backups, Microsoft | LEAVE A COMMENT
4 October 2019

Veeam Backup O365

While I’ve spent more than a few years working with Veeam’s Backup & Replication (VBR). But I’m pretty new to Veeam’s Backup O365 (VBO365). I recently learning about some of their differences while setting up a new install of VBO365 in an environment which already used VBR.

One is that unlike VBR, VBO365’s repositories don’t support drives have data deduplication enabled and running on it. It can be on a Windows server with the data deduplication role installed, that won’t break anything. But the disk volume that the repositoy lives on can not have a running data dedupe task, as you risk a change of corruption in your backup file.

The next is that it’s recommend that the VBO365 application is installed on it’s own VM. It can be run on the same VM as your VBR, but it can be resource intensive so they recommend it be running on it’s own.

The VBR backup job that is running against your VBO365 VM needs to be application aware. On top of that, they recommend running pre-job and post-job scripts to stop and start the VBO365 services. This means before the VBR job runs, it’ll need to run a script to stop VBO365 services (there are three services, though the RESTful API is probably already off by default). Then once the VBR job completes, it’ll need to start up it’s VBO365 services (there are two of them).

Luck for you and me, VBR can easily be set up to run the pre- and post- job scripts. And even luckier for you, I have already put together the Powershell command you’ll need to stop and start those services

Stop Services:

Get-Service | where {$_.name -match “Veeam.Archiver”} | sort-object Status -desc | stop-service

Start Services:

Get-Service | where {$_.name -match “Veeam.Archiver.Service”} | sort-object Status -desc | start-service

Get-Service | where {$_.name -match “Veeam.Archiver.Proxy”} | sort-object Status -desc | start-service

Category: Backups | LEAVE A COMMENT