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Comment by snailmailman | Hacker News Reader

I had multiple pi systems “bricked” after a power outage. Presumably it was file system corruption? I never looked into the issues further. I just wiped the drives and reinstalled. These were vanilla raspbian installs at the time. It happened a few times when I was first trying out my pi. These were a mix of me cutting the power and actual power outages.

I only ever had these issues with SD cards. I quickly switched to running my pi off a USB external SSD, and haven’t had any problems since then. Now when the power goes out, it boots back up properly and all my services start. All of this on ext3 I think?

Planning to redo things for ZFS at some point, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.

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This happened a lot to my Pi 3 back when I used the internal SD slot. I set it to boot off USB and used an old 8gb USB2 flash drive as the boot drive and never had the problem again.

Yeah, sd cards that you haven't put through extensive crash testing simply can't be trusted. I used to have a jar of sd cards that didn't survive testing.

The most noticeable raspberrypi SD card life lengthener for me has been to write logs to RAM (assuming you have a stable setup and don't count on them to survive a reboot!).

Our $job dashboards used to nuke an SD card every couple weeks/months, but since the move to logs-in-RAM we've been running the same SDs for years.

DIY via {fs,journalctl} config , or using https://github.com/azlux/log2ram

Also, mount the SD with the `noatime` flag of course: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Ext4#Disabling_access_time_...

Noatime, disable swap, logs in RAM, /tmp in RAM, .xsession errors in RAM(With logrotate or it will fill up! So many random problems can make a problem there), chromium profile folder in RAM if you do kiosk work(Browser makers must hate flash!).

From what I hear Home Assistant is still not the easiest if you want to run for years on a card, not sure if that's fixed now, but it's one of the big factors blocking me from moving to HA.

Any script/guide to do all this on a Raspberry Pi in one go? I'm very interested for some Pi Zero 2: every couple of months the microSD content gets corrupted and I have to rebuild the system + restore backups.

A guide I wrote for $job that covers what I mention in the parent-parent post, and a couple other things: https://unito.io/blog/better-raspberry-pi-dashboards/

Note: only a guide, not scripted yet. See footnote for why :)

The section starting at 827 is what I'm currently using, but it just covers the basics. Somewhere in there is also the kiosk launch script to run Chromium without breaking the card. If you use apache you'll need to add a service to create the logfile though.

https://github.com/EternityForest/KaithemAutomation/blob/dev...

Ooooh, excellent additions, thanks :)

There was a link a couple weeks ago to industrial sd cards on digikey. They're pricey, but they will work for years without disabling anything on these sorts of boards.

https://www.digikey.ca/en/products/filter/memory-cards/501?s... is the brand I used to use, iirc

If you automate a fsck at every boot you can make these kind of issues go away on the pi

Vjjnba

Sorry about that. Absolutely no idea how it got typed and posted. Had the page open this morning but I don't see how either pocket typing or feline interference could have done it…

You made the first page of Google with a brand new word!

My kid would leave these for me.

That won't help if your SD card got corrupted because of too many writes.

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