Apps / Pi SD Manager

Pi SD Manager app icon

Pi SD Manager

Back up and restore your Raspberry Pi's SD card — compact, verified and safe — straight from your Mac. The card insurance every Pi project should have.

macOS 14+ Backup & restore Compact images
Get Pi SD Manager What it does

Get Pi SD Manager

Download Pi SD Manager

Free · notarised & signed · checks for updates in-app.

Prefer the Terminal? brew install --cask halfgreybear/tap/pi-sd-manager

New to Pi backups? Read the guide: How to back up a Raspberry Pi SD card on a Mac.

Pull the card out a hero, not a headache.

Every Pi project lives on a fragile little SD card — one corruption, one yanked card, one experiment gone wrong, and it's gone. Pi SD Manager makes a clean, compressed image of a working card in a couple of clicks, and writes it back — to the same card or a fresh one — when you need it. No command line, no guesswork.

What it does

  • 01

    One-file backups

    Clone a card to a single, self-contained compressed file — date, source and size all baked in, ready to restore later.

  • 02

    Compact images

    Backs up only the space actually in use, not the whole card — a mostly-empty 32 GB card can shrink to a couple of gigabytes.

  • 03

    Verified restores

    After writing the card it reads the data straight back off it and checks it landed correctly — so you find out at your desk, not when the Pi won't boot.

  • 04

    Auto-expand on first boot

    Restore a compact image onto a bigger card and it grows the filesystem to fill the whole card automatically, first time it boots — no reboot, no faffing.

  • 05

    Reset a lost password

    Locked out of a Pi? Reset the account password directly on the card from your Mac, then pop it back in and log straight in.

  • 06

    Safe by design

    It can't see your Mac's system disk, so it can never offer to erase the wrong thing. It ejects the card when it's done and asks for your password only when it's actually imaging.

Beginner-proof.

No Terminal, no dd commands to fat-finger onto the wrong disk, and nothing to install — the filesystem tools it needs are built right into the app. Just open it, choose your card, and go. You don't have to be a Linux hand to keep your Pi safe.

Support

Pi SD Manager is built and supported by HALF GREY BEAR — a tool we made for our own Raspberry Pi builds. Questions, ideas or a card that's misbehaving? Email the studio.

email support ↗
What do I need to run it?
A Mac on macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later and an SD card reader. That's it — everything it needs is built in, so there's no setup and nothing extra to install.
Can I restore onto a different card?
Yes. With a compact backup you can even move to a smaller card, as long as the used data fits — and onto a bigger card it expands to fill the space on first boot.
Why does it ask for my password?
Reading and writing a raw SD card needs administrator access on macOS. The app asks once when you start a backup or restore, and nothing else is elevated.
Is it on the Mac App Store?
No — direct, low-level disk access can't run inside the App Store sandbox. It's a free, notarised download for macOS — grab it from Get Pi SD Manager above.
Can I install it with Homebrew?
Yes: brew install --cask halfgreybear/tap/pi-sd-manager. The cask tracks new releases automatically, and the app still updates itself in-app.

Privacy

Pi SD Manager collects no data. No account, no analytics, no tracking — and nothing leaves your Mac. Backups and restores happen entirely on your own machine; your images stay wherever you save them.

Questions about privacy? email us. Last updated June 2026.