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Best way to keep a hot spare SD card for a raspberry pi? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 3 months ago by traches@sh.itjust.works to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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I have a load-bearing raspberry pi on my network - it runs a DNS server, zigbee2mqtt, unifi controller, and a restic rest server. This raspberry pi, as is tradition, boots from a microSD card. As we all know, microSD cards suck a little bit and die pretty often; I've personally had this happen not all that long ago.

I'd like to keep a reasonably up-to-date hot spare ready, so when it does give up the ghost I can just swap them out and move on with my life. I can think of a few ways to accomplish this, but I'm not really sure what's the best:

The simplest is probably cron + dd, but I'm worried about filesystem corruption from imaging a running system and could this also wear out the spare card?
recreate partition structure, create an fstab with new UUIDs, rsync everything else. Backups are incremental and we won't get filesystem corruption, but we still aren't taking a point-in-time backup which means data files could be inconsistent with each other. (honestly unlikely with the services I'm running.)
Migrate to BTRFS or ZFS, send/receive snapshots. This would be annoying to set up because I'd need to switch the rpi's filesystem, but once done I think this might be the best option? We get incremental updates, point-in-time backups, and even rollback on the original card if I want it.

I'm thinking out loud a little bit here, but do y'all have any thoughts? I think I'm leaning towards ZFS or BTRFS.

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[–] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I've always used dd + sshfs to backup the entire sd card daily at midnight to an ssh server; retaining 2 weeks of backups.

Should the card die, I've just gotta write the last backup to a new card and pop it in. If that one's not good, I've got 13 others I can try.

I've only had to use it once and that went smoothly. I've tested half a dozen backups though and no issues there either.

[–] mumblerfish@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Do you dd the device directly, and while it is running for this?

[–] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Yeah "dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=$HOSTNAME.$(date +%Y.%m.%d).img" and while its running. (!!! Make sure the output is NOT going to the sd card you are backing up....)

I deliberately chose a time when it's not very active to perform the backup. Never had an issue, going on 6 years now.