rpi-clone VS PiShrink

I've been running a bunch of Pi's for years now, and the biggest problem I've had is the Pi itself dying: 24/7 usage is hard on a small device. I've also found that stable power is essential, and to that end I've always used 5v 3a branded power cubes, plugged into a pure sine wave UPS. Choice of micro-SDHC cards is important and I ended up getting ATP industrial cards (https://www.atpinc.com/products/industrial-sd-cards) - expensive but really long-lived. Finally, using RPi-clone (https://github.com/billw2/rpi-clone) on a regular basis has been a life-saver. I clone to Sandisk Extreme micro-SDHCs and can recover from an outage in minutes.

I would normally use the Pi SD-Card copier to duplicate the SD-Card to an SSD but I'm unsure if this is available on the Ubuntu image - you could possibly use this program [Github] if you are not keen on using dd with a running system.

Then you will need to clone the SD to the SSD, you can use many tools that are available from your desktop computer or you can try with rpi-clone, just connect the SSD with Pi booted from SD, stop any possible service/docker to prevent any copy error and run, adapting device naming but usually will be (check device with dmesg):

I used rpi-clone, it was super easy. Whole process took 10 minutes. https://github.com/billw2/rpi-clone

rpi-clone

There is a small utility, which shrinks the image by omitting the empty space. Then you can write it to any SD card, which the data will fit on. So in your case even on a 2GB card.

backup.sh - this is what makes the image and uses pishrink to shrink it

Depending on what single board computer you are using, you may want to look at PiShrink. This will at least allow you retroactively shrink the image you create to the actual amount of space used.

I was pretty familiar with most of this but I did not know about the "image backup" utility. You may also want to look at PiShrink in your process as well.

I run a full dd to create an image and then run pishrink https://github.com/Drewsif/PiShrink on it. I used to manually size the partition down with gparted and calculate how much to dd and then gparted the new card to expand the partition - too much work. Pishrink does all the work for you and is fast.