This would shit the bed in less than a year. Pi will corrupt the sd card after a few ungraceful shut downs.

This is a good reason to USB boot a Pi (yes, they’ve supported this for ages now) - no one should SD card boot a Pi in a production style environment, given the well documented card corruption issues.

Read only file systems on the SD boot volume are another solution, but this can cause other headaches (obviously) or may not be appropriate for the software you intend to run.

I have a RPi connected to my sprinkler solenoid valves via an OpenSprinklerPi board. It’s running the SIP [1] controller and a custom garage door plugin [2] I wrote.

It’s been running 24/7 in my garage since 2014. YMMV I guess?

[1] https://github.com/Dan-in-CA/SIP [2] https://github.com/andersix/sip_garage_plugin

Run an Amiga emulator on it, never shut down! And because it's cheap, run that three times, and have an emulated gameboy sound the alarm if one of the three stops responding, or delivers a different answer than the other two.

Getting it all into a software state that can easily be transferred to "something that runs Linux and this emulator that requires next to nothing" certainly seems sensible at any rate.

Have been running a Pi 24/7 for quite some time now with zero corruption.

Samsung EVO SD card, have multiple times rebooted by pulling the power (which is not ideal) because of unrelated issues that were due to some OS problems (SSH doesn't respond, etc) without a problem, but haven't had to do that in a long while after changing the OS and getting NIC stuff set up properly.

I have seen that the majority of SD corruption that happens tends to be in situations where Pis are being run under-powered off of a USB hub or something similar instead of a wall-plug.

I believe with a decent-quality SD card, and properly powering the Pi, the chances of SD corruption are relatively low. That said, I would prefer a USB3, SATA, NVME, or even eMMC interface, but the Pi has worked remarkably well for me. USB2 booting the Pi is always a backup option if my luck takes a turn for the worse

I have a PI in an interactive art installation that gets power cycled pretty freaking often, and so far the card has held up.

It is something I worry about though.

Can you just duplicate the card and use that image as a backup? I’ve stashed a few away like this but pcdoodle’s suggested solution sounds a lot more elegant.

This is actually more difficult than you’d expect in some ways. The vast majority of card cloning guides will advise you to use the ‘dd’ command line utility, which makes an exact replica of the card, including the free space.

Unfortunately not all SD cards, even if advertised as the same capacity, are exactly the same size. If your replacement card is just 1 byte smaller your dd clone won’t restore - the “free” space has to fit into the target card as well.

Long story short - most popular methods of cloning microSD cards for the Pi only ensure the ability to restore to a larger SD card, not necessarily one of the same advertized size.

For sure there are workarounds, but it’s not as straightforward as you might assume. Personally I’m much more a fan of other tools such as rsync or version control etc for cloning data to and from Pi projects.

The better answer is just to USB boot the Pi anyway - they’ve supported this for a while now, no card corruption issues to mitigate.

Thanks for this. I need to change what I’m doing.

rsyncing the entire root file tree should be good enough.

Clonezilla?

Read only file system guides are out there. This makes it 90% more reliable.

Netboot is now a thing on RPi.

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/network-boot-raspberry-pi-with...

Yeah, probably.

Right. I wonder what this Amgia can do what a Raspberry Pi or even ESP8266 can't? Bit banging a simple maintenance radio / 1200 baud protocol should not be that hard?

in the decades of accumulated parts lying in the building they could probably make a rendering farm