Backing up your Raspberry Pi

Take a complete dump of your SD card as backup. Then you or your kids can trash the system on the Raspberry Pi and you don't care as you would just do what you did to get Linux on your SD card again and everything would be back.

I used the Win32DiskImager.exe program used to get me started to "Read" the card to a backup file on my laptop. Make sure you don't "Write" as you will wipe all the work you have just done on your Raspberry Pi.

Raspbian Pi

Oh those clever chaps squeezing everything possible out of Linux on the Raspberry Pi.

They've gone and made it faster.

Oh, I know that I am halfway through setting it up for the girls.

But I just got to upgrade. To this : http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1605

So, download the image and I start again...

Woah! What's this?

A GUI setup screen?

Well done folks.

Making the Pi even easy to get started with.

Next, better install some software...

Setting up the Raspberry PI.

Once I had scavenged all the bits I needed to boot my Pi up I still needed to put the Operating System on it to get going.

A few easy steps...



1) Flashing the SD Card.

I used the download Debian Squeeze image from here - http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads

Then I followed the instructions here to put it on my SD card - http://elinux.org/RPi_Easy_SD_Card_Setup
I used the instructions for the Win32DiskImager.exe program. It was all very easy.

I used the Debian Squeeze image that is recommended for beginers.

It all booted fine so I was lucky. I know some SD cards can have issues and if this happens to you Google around to find a number of solutions that might help.

2) Re-sizing the partition for a larger than 2GB SD card.

Since I am using an 8GB card I decided to expand the partition so that the Pi could use more of the card for data. Also, I don't have a Linux machine to mount the card and expand in a nice user interface so I had to do it on the Pi itself. I think a lot of other people will be in the same boat and don't have another Linux machine to mount the SD card on. Although the instructions make it sound that it will be difficult to do manually on the Pi itself I can assure you it turned out to be very easy.

To do it I followed the instructions here - http://elinux.org/RPi_Resize_Flash_Partitions

In particular the section under "Manually resizing the SD card on Raspberry Pi".

A little note on the instructions that might help...

• d, 3 to delete the swap partition

Means "press D then <enter>" then "press 3 then <enter>".

• n p 2 to create a new primary partition

Means "press N then <enter>", "press P then <enter>", "press 2 then <enter>"

Just in case a novice gets confused as the instructions given are aimed at a novice.

All up and running with the girls getting very excited.

The Raspberry Pi has Arrived

So, it finally arrived.

Many months after registering it eventually dropped through my letter box.

A Raspberry Pie.

No, you can't eat it. In fact I will spell it correctly - Raspberry Pi.

But pronounced Pie. Just for some non-English speakers who pronounce the Greek letter Pi "pee".

Raspberry Pee?

I don't think that has the same connotations.

For those that don't know it's a tiny (credit card sized), very cheap bare bones computer aimed at educating kids and getting people everywhere to get their hands "dirty" messing about with computers.

It's meant to be fun.

We'll see won't we?

So, what to do with it? Endless possibilities can lead to paralysis through indecision.

To combat this I decided not to Tweet my frustration or lack of ideas but to do the old fashioned thing. Blog about it. I also think that by noting what I do and what goes right and wrong if I have to start again or set up another Raspberry Pi I can look back at these to remind myself.

So here I am. This blog will record my frustrations and hopefully some triumphs on getting this tiny little computer to do something. Fingers crossed it will even prove useful to someone else who is going through the same thing.

So here goes day one...

You get the little computer board. That's it top left in the picture.

Nothing else. But what did you expect? This is the cheapest full computer on the market by far.

You can judge the scale by the size of the SD card beside it.

I searched around the house for an SD card. It has to be at least 2GB. Anything above that is a bonus. By looking at the Raspberry Pi Wiki I could see that there were some SD cards that the Pi has trouble working with. Roughly it seems that the faster (Higher speed class e,g, Speed Class 10) caused more problems. That might be an overly general inference but they do say that they are working on their boot loader to work with all cards including the very fast ones. I played it safe and went from a speed class 4 card from a leading brand.

I then managed to find a spare mobile charger that output at least the minimum 0.7 amps at 5 volts as specified by Raspberry Pi.

Just in case some folks get a little confused note that the charger has two power ratings. One for input and one for output. This one is 0.2 amps (0.2A on the chargers label) at 100-240v (volts). This number doesn't matter. It's the output rating that matters. This one is labelled as 1.0A (amps) 5.0v (volts). All USB chargers should output 5 volts but the amps (A) that they can support varies. As long as they allow 0.7A or more (preferably 1.0A or more) then you are good to go.

The only other things you need that are not pictured here are a TV with a DVI input (or computer monitor that can take DVI) and a DVI cable.

All things collected together I was ready to get started.