Backup: Shrink makes as small as possible.
The shrink function will make the IMG as small as possible - it actually copies the filesystem and the resizes the filesystem copy to it's smallest possible size.

Restore: Expand to max size of the SD card.
The shrink function will determine the amount of available space on the target disk/SD, and if it first, will maximize the use of that disk by resizing the copied filesystem to as large as  the target device can hold.

So to see if 14Gb fits, first make a backup with "shrink" enabled. Save it as an uncompressed IMG file. The file size will tell you the minimum required space to restore this image.

Now to answer you question; can you make the partition smaller (32Gb -> 14Gb) to safe on backup time?
We, you can make the partition small I assume, but this will not make the backup time any faster.

To speed up backup times:
- do not compress the backup. Use the regular IMG format, and do not use ZIP, TGZ, GZIP, etc.
- backup to an SSD, especially when using the shrink function (quite a bit of disk activity when resizing).
- backup to an internal drive, USB drives or network shares are in general a lot slower.
- make a backup of your work files / data only (which is not what ApplePi-Baker is make for of course).
  A backup of the entire disk (OS, data, etc) just takes more time.
  Downside is that you do need to know what you need to backup and you do need to know how to restore.

sorry, I have answered to an old entry. My Mac died ...  Yes I am using the internal AND an external reader, both!

My iMac died z´the next day, so maybe this was the reason. I made an image copy on my Windows PC and the SD worked. I will try again with APB when I perform my next backup-

Btw. Is there a way to "shrink" the size of the SD Image? As far as I see, the Raspberry Partition is about 14 GB, can I bring this to a 32 GB Süß This will shorten the backup process.

Thanx

AjA

Just being curious, as I have experienced my share of issues with SD cards: Are you using the internal SD card reader? (not being very knowledgeable if an 2017 iMac has one) - do you have another SD card reader available for testing?
Also: do you have another SD car available, also just for testing.

It looks like everything is OK, from what I can see. The Helper tool does kick in and since you got to this point, I think it has done and passed it's read/write test already.

tried a lot restarted the Mac several times, activated Full Disk Access several times, ejected and reinserted the SD, all ended in errors??? any idea? thanx

PS: I Have a 27" 2017 iMAc, Ventura 13,7, 259 GB free disk space

I'm truly sorry to hear you're running into an issue.

I have seen in rare occasions that creating a NOOBS somehow confuse the Mac.
Best approach: close ApplePi-Baker, eject the disk, reinsert the disk and restart ApplePi-Baker.

This should not happen, but for some reason it does.
Since I haven't seen it happen in a while: What kind of Mac are you using (Intel, memory, disk space left and macOS version)?

I have again a "cannot open destination error" (see screen shot), my Mac also said: "Disc not correctly ejected" (without me doing anything).

I have also tried the NOOBS option

Can you help, please

Thanx

Andreas

"sudo" does require your password indeed - apologies for not mentioning that.
Not sure what you mean with "activated root user"? (normally under Unix like systems, this would be the "su" command - but MacOS will not let you use this)

Disk access: Oh that's not cool to see that error after resizing (although we now DO know that resizing will work).
You can try formatting the SD card, or use the "prepare for NOOBS option" (Advanced Disk Panel in ApplePiBaker, right click the drive, if you do not see any drives, click the drive icon in the upper right corner to toggle what drives will be shown).

p.s. you're probably experienced with this: on my Intel MacBook Pro, when inserting the SD card, the "write protect" switch sometimes moves to the write protect position. Make sure that didn't happen. 😉 

i m not very familiar with command line actions in Mac terminal. trying sudo .... requires a password??? I activated root user and gave him a password, but won' t work.

Next thing I was out for while and let APB in the state he was. Surprisingly he come back to work something. But in the end another error appears: he can't open the sd card???

 Getting more and more confused here

Should I reformat the card?

For the no-right error, you could try this changing the file attributes:

cd <directory where the IMG file is>
sudo chmod 777 RaspBack4_io_ubnt_07-08-24.img
sudo xattr -c RaspBack4_io_ubnt_07-08-24.img

• chmod 777 is going overboard, but at least we've got everything covered.
• I've used sudo to elevate your privileges.
• xattr removes extended attributes (may not be needed).

From what I can see, it is a Rasbpian Image and it is quite small (~11Gb). So we should be able to work with that 😊 

Hope this helps, and always feel free to ask 😊