Full image online network backup on Raspberry Pi 3B+ ?

madbrain · May 16, 2025 at 1:58 AM

I have been using LibreElec for many years on a Raspberry Pi 3B+. I keep this hardware specifically so that I can play 3D movies on my Sharp Aquos 3D TV.

I have run into issues a few times that required making backups and restoring from them.

Currently, I use Win32diskimager on Windows to backup/restore.

This has several issues for backups :

1. you must shut down LibreElec

2. you must physically remove the microSD card, which puts wear and tear on the reader and card contacts - but really the reader is the biggest concern

3. you must go to another computer to perform the backup

4. you must go back to LibreElec to insert the card, again putting wear on it and the reader

5. the backup operation can be quite long, as Win32diskimager is not file system aware. For example, about 13 minutes with a 64GB microSD card that maxes out the UHS-1 bus

For restores, problems 1/2/3/54are of course unavoidable. are similar. For problem 5 :

5. the restore operation is even slower than backup, as nearly all microSD cards have lower write speeds than read speeds. A 64GB card with 30MB write speed will take 34 minutes to restore.

I have 3 other Raspberry Pi running Raspberry Pi OS. I solved all these problems for backup using a program called Raspibackup. It does partial imaging for things like partition tables and boot sector, but uses TAR for file system backup, and thus does not waste time and space with unused parts of the file system. It is also capable of backing up to my NAS over SMB. And it even shuts down services during backup, and restarts them, so that there are no problems with other programs running live simultaneously. This means a backup can take closer to 3-5 minutes, without shutting down or removing the SD card, and a restore takes a bit longer, but still much less than a half hour.

I am wondering if a similar backup solution might exist for LibreElec, or if it would be possible to just run Raspibackup under it to achieve the same result.

Alternately, just having an imaging solution that is file system aware would still be helpful to cut backup & restore time, but wouldn't help with physical intervention and wear and tear.

**chewitt** · May 16, 2025 at 4:58 AM

There is/was a Kodi Backup add-on in the Kodi repo. I've never used it, but it might be worth looking into. It probably backs-up only to a "local" filesystem path, so to save off-box you'll need to configure a persistent SMB mount (there are instructions in the wiki) so there's a local filesystem path under /var/media/ to the remote NAS share.

The backup function in the LE settings add-on also captures /storage/.kodi, /storage/.cache, /storage/.config to a tarball which is saved to /storage/backups. Unless you are locally storing media on the SD card which needs to be preserved those are probably the only folders which need to be backed-up. It doesn't handle movement of the file off-box though.