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[soxfan1966]

I know the answer to this is buried somewhere in here, but I was looking for something in my desk and came across the second SD card I bought with my Pi.  Figured I should use it to make a backup at this point.

It's been one of those weeks (actually closer to two) where everything is either a mess or there are 30 things going on at once so I have not made it back into picking up with some of the new tweaks (i.e. switching to the Alexia integration in HG as opposed to the HA Bridge, as well as some email notifications).

So I'd appreciate if someone could give me a quick and easy way to get things backed up while I have both a few minutes and the backup SD card in the same place at the same time.

Thanks

[Tuicemen]

You need to use Win32 disk imager if you wish to make a backup of your SD card.
Step one: Place the working SD card in your pc and open disk imager select the image file you wish to make.
Step two: make sure the drive letter is pointing to the SD card not another drive.
Step three: click read  this reads the SD card to the file you specified
Step four: when done pull the SD card and place the one you wish to write to in the PC.
Step five:make sure the drive letter is pointing to the SD card not another drive or you'll write the image to that drive (I've done that)
Step Six: Be sure you have the correct image to write selected (if you didn't close dis imager it should still be displaying) and press write
 

[soxfan1966]

Trying to do this now.  When I open the drive in Disk Imager that has my SD card on it I see the following:

overlays (a folder)
kernel.img
kernel7.img

Do I do each one at a time or select them all and do them all together?

[soxfan1966]

I tried the kernel.img and also the kernel7.img but when I click the Read footer button I get this error:

[Tuicemen]

When your reading or writing the location must be different.
If your SD card is J: you read to another drive C:\SDcard\Pix10Hub.img for example

[soxfan1966]

Ahhh - so the Drop down where you pick the Drive is the "TO": location for the Read, correct?  I already hooked it back up and will need to do it later.

I did make a full copy of the contents of the drive (copied everything to a folder on a backup drive I have) - but I assume the image is still the thing we want.

What about the kernel.img vs kernel7.img - do I want both of those ?

[Tuicemen]

Think of an image as a zip (condensed) file of the whole SD card all files on the SD card are read to the image file you specify.
When you write an image it takes the image file and expands them to make the image usable in the Pi.
Don't try to pick individual files from the SD card you need them all.

[soxfan1966]

OK - so in the image I posted, where it has the dropdown for drive J, what do I pick ?

[Tuicemen]

Type in a location and file name example C:/SD-card-backup/PiX10Hub.img however the location (folder) must exist so you'd need to create the SD-card-backup folder prior.
The browse button is more for locating existing img files

[soxfan1966]

So I have the 2 locations backwards I think.

The drive selection on the top right is the drive to COPY and the file dropdown on the top left is COPY TO location - is that correct (sorry, obviously not enough coffee this morning).

[Tuicemen]

The drive letter on the right is always your SD card. The location on the left is always your image file you wish to read or write.

[Tuicemen]

Clicking read makes the file specified.
Clicking write extracts the img file from the file location specified to the device specified. Thus always make sure that is the SD card as windows doesn't always auto select the correct drive.

[soxfan1966]

Thank you sir - I got the backup image of my SD card.  Ran into a failure with the blank SD card I was going to use as the backup (windows wont recognize it for some reason - tried rebooting, etc, no luck).  At least I have a backup image on my backup hard drive.

[Tuicemen]

  At least I have a backup image on my backup hard drive.

Glad yo see you got that far. writing to a new SD card will be simple as selecting the image on your PC and making sure your New SD card drive is correct then clicking write.

Win32 disk imager will always though a few SD format requests when initially attempting to write to a SD card just click cancel on the messages.
 If disk imager fails to write your backed up image to a SD card try Etcher I've had to use this on occasion.