Do you like to explore all the technical possibilities of your gadgets like me? Sometimes setting up something can consume quite a lot of time. I had a RaspberryPi running for several month as Airplay station now. But since my Boxee is getting more and more hard to run reliably I’m looking for a replacement of it. Nothing easier than that, since I already have a RaspberryPi that can run XBMC just fine. But I only have one SD card laying around, so should I risk my Airplay installation for nothing? Just backup the current SD card image and play it back later if I’m not happy with XBMC/RaspberryPi as my Streaming client replacement. How to do that?

• Power down your RaspberryPi if necessary
• Take out the SD card and put it in your PC/Mac
• Identify the disk number of your device. On Mac you can use diskutil list to see all the devices
• Copy and compress the SD card to your local disk:

  sudo dd if=/dev/rdisk8 bs=1m | gzip > /raspberrypi/airplay.img.gz
  

References

• http://wiki.openelec.tv/index.php?title=Installing_OpenELEC_on_Raspberry_Pi#tab=Mac_OSX