Back up Storage Cards and Cameras with the Little Backup Box

Productivity Sauce

Worry about keeping your photos safe when you are on the move? Enter Little Backup Box. This simple Bash shell script cobbled together by yours truly transforms a Raspberry Pi into a simple, reliable and fully-automatic photo backup device. The script detects and mounts a storage device like a USB stick or hard disk as soon as it's connected. It then does the same with a card reader (with a storage card in it) or a camera when one of these is connected. The script then transfers photos from either the card reader or the camera to the storage device. Once the backup operation is completed, the script shuts the Raspberry Pi down. Little Backup Box has been tested with Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, but it should work with any Model B.

The script requires only two additional packages: gPhoto2 and rsync. To enable basic visual feedback, you can add a BlickStick Nano board. To make it easier to deploy the script and the required software, Little Backup Box comes with a helper script that automates the entire installation and setup process. Turning a Raspberry Pi into a photo backup box using the helper script is a matter of running the following commands on a Raspberry Pi:

wget https://goo.gl/uZ2QtB -O install-little-backup-box.sh
sudo chmod +x install-little-backup-box.sh
./install-little-backup-box.sh
sudo reboot

To try something different, I opted for Fossil as a version control system, and all code for the Little Backup Box project is available on Chisel for your hacking and forking pleasure.