Backing up the SD card#

To create a compressed image using PiShrink#

sudo bash -Eeuo pipefail -c '
  # Timestamp like 2025-07-19_19-38-33
  ts=$(date +%F_%H-%M-%S)

  # Paths on /media/RAW
  raw="/media/RAW/Cinemate_${ts}.img"         # working image
  final="/media/RAW/cinemate_${ts}.img.xz"    # desired end-result

  # 1 ─ Image the SD-card (pads bad blocks, keeps sparsity)
  dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of="$raw" \
     bs=4M conv=noerror,sync,sparse status=progress

  # 2 ─ Shrink + parallel-xz compress **in place**
  /usr/local/bin/pishrink.sh -s -v -Z -a "$raw"

  # 3 ─ Rename the freshly-made .xz to the lowercase style you want
  mv "${raw}.xz" "$final"

  # 4 ─ Remove the now-unused raw image
  rm -f "$raw"
'

Check the name of the resulting file#

cd /media/RAW
ls

Your output will look something like this:

check_name_of_image_file

The file ending with .img.xz is your compressed file.

To copy the file to your desktop computer:#

# From the desktop computers terminal

scp pi@cinepi.local:/media/RAW/cinemate_2025-07-29_13-37-37.img.xz ~/Downloads/

# Change the file name to that of you image file.

When unpacking the image, it will inflate to the smallest possible size, even if it was made from a larger SD card. So an Cinemate image created from a 64 GB SD card will inflate to only about 6 GB, allowing for flashing it to SD cards down to 8 GB.