Raspberry Pi 3 - backing up the OS

     After getting the Raspberry Pi updated and shut down safely, I continued doing research and discovered it was a good idea to back up the micro-SD card with the OS (operating system). The OS can get corrupted very easily and having a backup is a good idea.

      I found a lot of similar information online. Backing up the OS mainly involved downloading the WIN32 Disk Imager and using it to make a copy to your regular PC's hard drive. This didn't work for me because my OS disk that came with my RPi was partitioned and I couldn't figure out how to do it. I've found recently that there is a setting that I need to adjust to change it but I have not tried it yet so if it works I'll document it.

     Fortunately, there is a utility on the RPi3 itself to make a backup onto a USB stick drive. I happened to have a spare 64Gb available and backed up my OS onto that. The process took about 10 minutes but I was not timing it. The backup utility will delete all information on the USB stick so double check it to make sure you don't lose important information. I believe previous versions of the RPi did not have this capability.