SD Clone 3 has some awesome new features and I wanted give an overview of what it can do and some background on how those features came to be.
New Feature 1: Image Central
One of the common issues when someone gets a new Raspberry Pi is “What do I do with it now?” Image Central is a great place to grab an image of a great existing project, put it on an SD Card, boot up the Pi, and start experimenting. I plan on discussing these projects in a series of upcoming post and will be adding more to the list in the future. Image Central has images for a couple of media players, the base Raspbian OS, a music player, and more.
New Feature 2: Verify SD Card
A year ago, I ordered a dozen or so 8 GB Micro SD Cards from Amazon. I wanted to make sure that I got quality SD cards, so I ordered cards that were from Kingston, and the seller was Kingston and not a 3rd party. Once I got the cards, I found that after imaging them, they refused to mount. I thought there was an issue with my process, but it turns out that the cards were counterfeit. after some research, it became clear that testing SD cards is a important feature for anyone that does deployments with SD Card based iOT device. So the Verify SD Card feature was added to SD Clone. It generates random series of bytes that get written to the SD card to fill it up, and once it is full, it regenerates that same series of random numbers and verifies that the data was written correctly.
New Feature 3: Toolbar
Not a new function, but the toolbar gives you access to all the interesting features that you might not have been aware of before. Right from the toolbar, you can eject a SD Card, shrink a Linux (ext 2/¾ filesystem), get access to tutorial videos and more!
New Feature 4: Purchase in the App
With SD Clone 2, we featured a “pay what you want” model, and found that most people were paying about $40 for SD Clone. We decided to build that price in and give an option for a Pro feature as well (with Unlimited Concurrent Restores). When you download the app as a Trial, you get access to all the features, and when the trial runs out, it reverts to a Free version which has a limited feature set (restoring images, Image Central). You can upgrade to the paid version right in the app, using the awesome system from Paddle. And if you decide you want to upgrade from Standard to Pro after your purchase, you can do that right in the app as well. Pretty slick.
There are a bunch of other features (like .gz image support, better file naming inside the zip file, etc) so I think you’ll really like SD Clone 3. Head over to twocanoes.com and download a trial and let me know what you think.
I also created a video of the new features, so check that out as well: