Thanks so much and whatabout compression options?

[paulf123b]

Hi. Thank you so much for building this. I've messed around with all of these: plain old dd, rsync, raspiBackup, PiShrink and other scripts but I like your solution the most! I use it to keep my 3D printer's Pi backed up.

I know this would be complicated with the incremental backups, but personally I'd prefer to have full dailys anyway.... but yeah have you any thoughts of a compression option(s?) I know I can manually or by script compress but an integrated method would be great. With 7zip I compress down to about 1/3 of the .img. With my skills not much stronger than copy/paste I did tried piping the output ( | 7z a -si ) but of course this was silly given the scripts prompts and output.

Thanks again!

[UnconnectedBedna]

Hello and thank you so much for the very kind words!
Makes me really glad to read!

I have thought about compression and decided not to do it.
Reasoning:
Just as you state incremental backups would take WAY longer.
Fixing an uncompression of a file before the backup runs is not a problem per se, but the idea of the script is very much "KISS", keep it stupid simple, so when I started to write the code, it just felt wrong. "This is for the user to do if they want".
Beside that, it also introduces yet another dependency in form of compression software.
Arguably tar is usually installed, but not always, so I would have to check for that too.

In the end I just felt that the amount of work, compared to how easy it is for the user to do the same, was not worth it to me.

If you want a workflow where this is achieved, I suggest writing your own script that launches shrink-backup and when done, compresses the image for you.
Or if you prefer something like crontab, just make sure to first run shrink-backup then add subsequent commands separated with &&.

But as always, if someone want to create this, and it makes sense to include, I have nothing against accepting a pr that compresses the image after it is created.
But I would also demand that the user could then run an incremental backup towards that compressed file. 🙂