Sadly yes. They *are* cheap enough to replace, however, some *warning* that we are about to transition from working system to "Can't write to file system, extfs struggling..." to "whole thing has locked up" to "and no it doesn't boot any more" would be nice.
Specifically, a pedant who didn?t lose anything when his Pi?s SD card failed without warning the other day.
Surely you lost the SD card?
I should hope not.
But the pedantry was the strict 'one true stick' interpretation of what is meant by 'backup'.
Pedant :-)
Not necessarily. It may have been that the boot files on the SD card became corrupted but the card was still capable of storing data once the card was restored from a disk image.
This happened to me once with my Pi3. It had rebooted many times. There hadn't been a power cut since the last time it had successfully booted (ie unlikely to have failed to flush buffers). I hadn't installed any software updates since the last successful boot. But a normal "Reboot", like I'd done many times before, failed very early on in the boot process. I couldn't find any workaround for the error message that I got, so I had to reinstall everything - from NOOBS onwards. It was after this that I wrote a crib sheet of all the customisations I'd made and software I'd installed, and I make a fresh disk image (shutdown, moved SD card to Windows PC, run Win32DiskImager, move card back to PI and reboot) every few months. I didn't lose any user data (apart from the configurations of channels in the TVHeadend PVR software) because all the data (TV recordings) are stored on a separate spinning HDD rather than on the SD card. I also back up those recordings using SyncToy on Windows, accessing them via SMB share.
It's the only time I've had a failure like this. I've carried on using the same SD card for several years since and it's never gone wrong again.
Saw a cartoon the other day along the lines of:
Tech Support: Did you back up?
Scared customer: Why? Is it going to explode?
Yes, it's an ambiguous word.
l-) yes, it?s a very small coaster now. Also an hour or so figuring out how to turn my backup back into a bootable system.
On Tue, 2 Feb 2021 21:39:40 +0000, Chris Green declaimed the following:
I did kill an SD card... I had managed to compile and run the HINT benchmark suite (had to tweak the parameters a lot -- the examples were listed from back in the days of 233MHz Pentiums, and a 1+GHz processor just overran the benchmark) -- using free space on the SD card for swap. After that I configured a USB hard drive for swap...
The Aviation Safety Letters issued by Transport Canada are headed by an appropriate saying:
Learn from others' mistakes; you won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
"Have you put the cat out?"
"I didn't realise it was on fire."
David
I was not aware of that motto, but it's very apt!
I also have a (small form factor) USB stick in the Pi4.
You can also connect an (external) USB SSD and rsync to it, and rsync (at least $HOME) to an external box.
It's also helpful to clone the SD card and put it in save place, maybe even tape it to the box.
el
WOuld you mind posting the steps?
el
On 2021-02-03 16:34 , Richard Kettlewell wrote: [...]
Backup is for sissies :-)-O
el
Thank you,
el
Op 06-02-2021 om 14:48 schreef Dr Eberhard W Lisse:
Please don't top-post, "Dr."
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