How to Backup Raspberry Pi SD Card on macOS

by Rian

I’m in the process of retiring my old Pi setups. It’s worth its own op-ed piece, but primarily, I built these DIY projects when Raspbian was still a thing on Buster. The latest Raspberry Pi OS (now renamed) is Trixie. I don’t know how I should take it, perhaps someone from professional background would have differing opinion — having to realize a pet project from 2019 is obsolete in 2026 felt off. So I am retiring the old ones completely — hopefully I will find use for them in the future projects.

Now the pleasantries are out of the way, let’s get back to business. The worst case scenario for old Raspberry Pis would be dead SD cards, the weakest link in the system. Even if it is alive now, it’s better to back it up when you have a chance.

1. Plug in the Raspberry Pi microSD card.
2. Using diskutil list, find out the path of SD card. (e.g. /dev/diskN)
3. Run the following command, where N is the value from the previous step and [path_to_img] is your path and filename of your choice.*

sudo dd if=/dev/rdiskX of=[path_to_img] bs=4m status=progress

Here is the sample I ran on my machine:

sudo dd if=/dev/rdisk6 of=~/Downloads/pi_2026-03.img bs=4m status=progress

* Without going into too details, rdisk is simply faster than disk, due to lack of buffer.

Raspberry Pi OS does have a backup software, except it’s meant to be used on the Pi itself. Practically speaking, with the included software, you need to plug in a USB drive to the Pi and run the SD Card Copier. If Pi is your primary computer, the official software will do just fine. In my case, since Pi was serving as a headless server in network, that wasn’t practical. Also, as far as I know, SD Card Copier only supports GUI.