When it comes to perfect backup's, RAW disk-images are the choice for safest form of backup and restoration of fully functional operating-system installations. We have shared two methods of using the same to backup Raspberry Pi SD Card from Windows as well as Hot Backup's from RPi itself using Linux DD disk imaging utility. Once created we can also Mount these backup images with full read-write access for various tasks like Data recovery (For example imaging an corrupted disk and accessing the disk-image from another working computer to recover data).

OSFMount is a free Windows utility which allows you to do that, the software enables users to mount local disk image files in Windows with a drive letter which can be accessed like any other partition. The images can be mounted in read-only mode as well as write-enabled mode, OSFMount also supports creation of RAM disks (See What are RAM Disks and How they can be used to make use of non-addressable wasted RAM on Windows) which offers a huge speed boost over using disk-based images.

Since we are supposed to do a lot of tweaking and tinkering with our Raspberry Pi installations, it is always a good idea to backup the working SD card image before venturing for any experimentation. One way to do this is to take the whole SD card out and use another Windows/Mac computer to backup and restore the full sd-card image as demonstrated earlier. To save you with this much hassle, here we are with another method to perform automated "hot backups" from a Raspberry Pi itself to an external USB disk drive or remote storage. Simply use the provided Shell script and enjoy fast, efficient and automated RPi backups.