this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
175 points (96.3% liked)

Selfhosted

39435 readers
5 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I recently decided to replace the SD card in my Raspberry Pi and reinstall the system. Without any special backups in place, I turned to rsync to duplicate /var/lib/docker with all my containers, including Nextcloud.

Step #1: I mounted an external hard drive to /mnt/temp.

Step #2: I used rsync to copy the data to /mnt/tmp. See the difference?

Step #3: I reformatted the SD card.

Step #4: I realized my mistake.

Moral: no one is immune to their own stupidity πŸ˜‚

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 43 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (11 children)

Fuck up #1: no backups

Fuck up #2: using SD cards for data storage. SD cards and USB drives are ephemeral storage devices, not to be relied on. Most of the time they use file systems like FAT32 which are far less safe than NTFS or ext4. Use reliable storage media, like hard drives.

Fuck up #3: no backups.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (10 children)

Would an SSD be any better than a pen drive or should it be stored on spinning rust?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

In my experience, flash drives are way more reliable than SD cards and I'd put SSD and HDD above both of those.

I wish they'd just ditch the SD card on the Pi already as it's always the most likely reason why your stuff stops working. For my Pi running Home Assistant, I've swapped to an SDD as the boot drive. For the others, I still use SD cards but they're just doing basic stuff like running Klipper on my 3d printer or a (WIP) live photo frame that can be easily swapped with a replacement SD later.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It really depends how you define reliability. SD cards are physically nigh indestructible, but can show failure when overwritten often. Hence for one off backups it's actually a good alternative. It will start showing problems when used as a medium that often writes and overwrites the same data often.

I would recommend backups on SD cards in an A/B fashion when you want to give a backup to someone else to store safely.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Reliability in that I've used flash drives and SD cards for years but have only ever had issues with corrupt SD cards (probably at least half a dozen times) while I've never had any with flash drives.

Constant writes is an issue with them, which is why I think it's stupid that the Raspberry Pi Foundation continues to use them as the default storage/OS drive. Then again, they continue to make insane choices with power supplies as well, so it shouldn't be a big surprise.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I really wish they'd just give us an m.2 slot on the back

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (7 replies)
load more comments (7 replies)