Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Shutting Down Your
Raspberry Pi
When you shut down your Raspberry Pi, it is very important that you don't simply
remove the power supply but make sure you always instruct the OS to shut down
safely. The latest version of NOOBS has a Shutdown desktop icon for shutting down
your Raspberry Pi cleanly if you are using the GUI—just click the icon and your
Raspberry Pi will do all the work.
However, if you are not using the GUI you will not see this icon, and will need to use a
text command to shut down your Raspberry Pi. You can learn how to do this in
Adventure 2, in the section “Using Shutdown and Restart Commands”.
Backing up an SD Card Image
You have only used your Raspberry Pi once so far, but you have already made changes
to the configuration of the operating system. As you move through the projects in this
topic, you may wish to make copies as you go along to make sure you don't lose any of
your work if your SD card stops working for any reason. It is very easy to do this using
a free Windows application called Win32 Disk Imager. Download this application from
http://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/
before continuing
with the following steps.
1.
First, if you have not yet shut down your Raspberry Pi, follow the instructions in
the previous section to do so now, using the following command:
sudo shutdown -h now
2.
Take your SD card out of your Pi and place it into your computer's SD card
reader.
3.
Run the Win32 Disk Imager on your desktop computer by locating the folder
into which you extracted it and double-clicking the application icon.
4.
In the Image File box (see Figure 1-11), type a name of your choice for your
backed up image—Adventures_In_Pi, for example.
5.
Click the folder icon to browse to a location on your computer where you would
like to save your backed up image.
6.
Click Read to copy the image from the SD card to your computer.
7.
Wait for the progress bar to become full before closing the software and remov-
ing your SD card.
In the future, when you become more skilled, it's likely you will have multiple cards with
different project images on them. You can save all these to your computer separately.
It's a good idea to back them up in this way, to keep all your files safe. It is also best to
store one image on one SD card and use separate cards for each project you work on.
