From what happened to me - cards die, especially older ones when there is a lot of data written to them even without power failures (UPS ensured that). And when

From what happened to me - cards die, especially older ones when there is a lot of data written to them even without power failures (UPS ensured that). And when you have a journaled filesystem there is a lot of writes. I made hybrid systems where either the card is only used to boot the system and everything (root included) is loaded from a USB drive or where card is mounted R/O, there is small ramdisk for volatile data and only when upgrade/reconfiguration is needed you remount it r/w, do what you need and then remount it back r/o. In both those setups cards didn't fail for the last 3-4 years. With a standard SD card root-fs they lasted about 4-6 months.