3 ms·

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 tho

• lostlogin 8y ago
  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.
  • giobox 8y ago
    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.
    • lostlogin 8y ago
      Thanks for this. I need to change what I’m doing.
    • nijave 8y ago
      Clonezilla?
    • blhack 8y ago
      rsyncing the entire root file tree should be good enough.
• pcdoodle 8y ago
  Read only file system guides are out there. This makes it 90% more reliable.