[lostlogin]

There is something special about the Pi that makes an “oh well, time to reflash and start again” a non-disaster.

They are great and hacking about with them is fun, even when disaster strikes.

[prox]

My version control on the Pi is different SD cards, I just copy the stable versions over and rotate. It’s fun :)

[offtop5]

What's the best way to backup the actual sd card. I plan to store it on the cloud. I tried using Windisk 32 and it didn't work .

[lostlogin]

I’ve used Pi Baker on the Mac.

It kind of hurts that the image is the same size as the SD card when the card might be pretty much empty, but it does make recovery easier.

[bombcar]

Write zeros to the empty space (many method available- make a big file of zeros or something and delete it) - then your image of the SD card should compress really well.

[sildur]

You can also use fallocate -d if you are in Linux.

[offtop5]

Great suggestion.

Actually I think rpi clone can clone down to a smaller sd card

https://github.com/billw2/rpi-clone

You could clone down to like a 4 gig SD card, and then back up that SD card.