this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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Best way to keep a hot spare SD card for a raspberry pi? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 3 months ago by traches@sh.itjust.works to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Why are you using a MicroSD at all? Get a used minipc with two sata ssds or a single board computer with eMMC or mpcie support

[–] dan@upvote.au 6 points 3 months ago

Get a used minipc

Why, when the Pi is working fine? Just get a USB to SATA cable. This one works great with the Pi: https://a.co/d/8Jv2Erj

[–] traches@sh.itjust.works 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I definitely won’t be buying a new pi anytime soon for exactly that reason but I’ve had this one for awhile and would prefer to do something useful with it.

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

BTW in my anecdata I've yet to have a failure on any of my SanDisk Extreme Pro SD cards. I have 4 in active use on different Pi 4s. The oldest one is in use since 2018-ish. It used to be a NAS till 2022 so roughly 3-4 years of 24/7 use with a bog-standard OS. It's now running OpenWrt which does fewer writes.