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