I have a load-bearing raspberry pi on my network - it runs a DNS server, zigbee2mqtt, unifi controller, and a restic rest server. This raspberry pi, as is tradition, boots from a microSD card. As we all know, microSD cards suck a little bit and die pretty often; I’ve personally had this happen not all that long ago.

I’d like to keep a reasonably up-to-date hot spare ready, so when it does give up the ghost I can just swap them out and move on with my life. I can think of a few ways to accomplish this, but I’m not really sure what’s the best:

  • The simplest is probably cron + dd, but I’m worried about filesystem corruption from imaging a running system and could this also wear out the spare card?
  • recreate partition structure, create an fstab with new UUIDs, rsync everything else. Backups are incremental and we won’t get filesystem corruption, but we still aren’t taking a point-in-time backup which means data files could be inconsistent with each other. (honestly unlikely with the services I’m running.)
  • Migrate to BTRFS or ZFS, send/receive snapshots. This would be annoying to set up because I’d need to switch the rpi’s filesystem, but once done I think this might be the best option? We get incremental updates, point-in-time backups, and even rollback on the original card if I want it.

I’m thinking out loud a little bit here, but do y’all have any thoughts? I think I’m leaning towards ZFS or BTRFS.

  • MellowEnglish
    6•1 month ago

    I’ve had very bad luck with raspberry Pi’s and SDCards. They just don’t seem to last very long. I swapped to usb storage and things got somewhat better. I just had a usb drive die after 3 to 4 years of use. When I was still using SD it seemed like multiple times a year. Heat. Power loss, you can only punch holes in silicon so many times before it wears out. Whatever the reason.

    My approach for this is configuration backup not the entire os. I think this approach is better for when it’s time to upgrade the os or migrate to a new system.

    For my basic Pi running WireGuard and DNS, I keep an archive of documentation on steps to reconfigure the system after a total loss. Static configs are backed up once, and If there are critical configuration items that change then I back those up weekly. I’ve got two systems (media related servers, not Pi’s) that I keep ansible playbooks to configure 90% of the system from scratch so it’s as hands off as it can be.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      2•1 month ago

      Yeah, I’m getting a pretty strong consensus here that an SSD is the way to go. I’ve also had at least one SD card die on me, and because I didn’t have backups it was pretty inconvenient. Had to recreate my homeassistant setup from scratch.

      I get the config only backup, but when I have a mondohuge nas available and we’re dealing with like less than 100 gigs, why not just take a full disk image?

    • Possibly linuxEnglish
      2•1 month ago

      If you are killing SD cards you shouldn’t be using a raspberry pi. They aren’t exactly work horses