Cloning an SD Card

Cloning an SD card is a great way to back up or duplicate your setup. You may want to clone the black label SDCard your system came with to a better quality SDCard. Here’s how to do it.

Some caveats before we get started.

• ⚠️ This will erase the target card completely.
• ⚠️ These methods create a full 1:1 clone of your SD card — even if only 500MB is used, the resulting image will match the card’s total size (e.g., 32GB for a 32GB card), but it includes hidden partitions.
• ⚠️ The restored image will match the original SD card’s size. Larger cards can be used, but extra space won’t be accessible unless manually expanded.
• ℹ️ For long-term storage, compress the image using your OS’s zip feature or a tool like 7-Zip, it’ll be much smaller than the raw image file.

🧰 What You’ll Need

• A computer with an SD card reader
• Two SD cards (source and destination)
• A utility like:
  • Windows: Win32 Disk Imager
  • macOS/Linux: The dd command (built-in)

🪟 Windows Instructions

1. Download and open Win32 Disk Imager
2. Insert your source SD card.
3. • Choose the device letter of your SDCard.
   • Click the little Folder Icon 📂 to choose where to save the Image. Name your image something like SDCardBackup.img
   • Click Read to create the image file. Depending on the size of your SDCard this will take a while for my 32GB SD Card it took 15min. (128GB=1h)
4. Remove the source from your reader and insert your target SD card.
5. Select the same image file(already selected if you just did the read) and click Write.

⚠️ This will erase the target card completely.

🍎 macOS/Linux Instructions (using dd)

1. Insert the source SD card, open Terminal, and run:

   diskutil list
   

2. Find the source card (e.g. /dev/disk2) and clone it:

   sudo dd if=/dev/diskX of=~/sdcard_backup.img bs=1m
   

3. Swap in the target SD card and write the image:

   sudo dd if=~/sdcard_backup.img of=/dev/diskX bs=1m
   

⚠️ This will erase the target card completely.

⚠️ Replace /dev/diskX with your actual device paths!

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✅ Done!

You’ve now copied your SD card. If it boots and works, go treat yourself to a cookie.