It depends upon what tools you use to "clone" the card. If you're "Desktop" based the provided (in Raspberry PiOS) "SD Card Copier" works very well. IIRC there's a command-line version of it (or a similar tool) pi-clone ? I also suspect that, in practice, no "working system" would be using all the available space so if an "image file" is "absolutely necessary" then, maybe, just dd (or equivalent) a slightly smaller image. Personally I haven't used such for several years (and, probably only "pre-"SD-Card Copier"). For "data-only" backups I use Unison (rsync) which is fast because it only adds new and updates changed files to the backup. As a Physicist (now retired) who used "computers" (and purpose-designed-and-built-systems) to collect and/or generate data it was always important to a) store the data elsewhere, backup A.S.A.P. and, maybe make a third copy that could be stored an a different, physical location.I have compared two Kingston Canvas Select 32Gb and both have the same actual capacity. Barely it would be possible, if the capacity would depend from manufacturing errors. Maybe, some manufacturers reserve that space, to make the life ot the card longer. According to the table above, the biggest difference in capacity is around 1.5Gb (it looks much). The worst thing that these differences in capacity make it harder to clone the RPI SD Card (You will have to shrink the partition or shrink the image with additional utilities if your new SD Card has smaller capacity).The slight differences are from manufacturing errors that leave memory cells unusable. It's mostly 32GB in size, with slight odd differences.
Trev.
Statistics: Posted by FTrevorGowen — Sat May 25, 2024 10:27 pm