Raspberry Pi SD card file issues

[mark66j]

I've been using RPi for some home automation work, and have run into one issue that this project should consider.

Every once in a while a Pi becomes unbootable because of corruption on the SD card. This can happen because of improper shutdown on power loss, but also might result from a lot of writes to the SD card.

Sometimes an fsck will fix the card, but I've had a couple that I couldn't fix. If it can be fixed, there may be some data lost.

In a home setup you can make this less painful by making a backup image of each SD card, including all of the local configuration for the Pi, so that you can just crank out a new SD card if the old one dies.

In a remote setup this is obviously more of an issue.

Some things that I think could be done by MMRA to reduce problems (these wouldn't be mandatory for the public project, as they would increase costs):

1. Explore booting from a USB device. This may still be experimental and might only work on a RPi 3, see this link: https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pi-3-booting-part-i-usb-mass-storage-boot/
2. Store all the critical configuration on USB storage, so that if the card goes bad less is lost. Still requires someone to go to the site to swap the SD card.
3. Make sure the PI power has some battery backup, reducing the chance for file corruption.
4. (Probably not realistic) Have a failover Pi for each online one

There are other single-board computers that can boot from SATA drives, but this would drive up the costs a lot and none of these are nearly as standard as the RPi.

[n1iic]

I have also read about concerns with card failures and have been a little concerned with them myself, but I no longer believe it's as necessary to be alarmed unless it's in use at a remote location and there are gigabytes of writing and erasing on a regular basis.
The pi natively handles wear leveling, and with a high quality card of a large size I think this small project will last a significant amount of time.
This post talks about studies and testing:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=142626 and look for a post by levelcrow just past half way.
If there is a great concern, the card could only be used for booting which would last almost indefinitely. Pair that with a small, quality, spinning or SSD usb drive and that would be great.
I do agree with using a UPS, I have had corruption issues from time to time with power being removed without cleanly shutting down.

Jason

[jmlzone]

I finally managed to corrupt a SD card on the PiPtr test system on my desk, took a hard SW crash not sure of the root cause. Thanks for the ideas. Power was not the issue.

As for the confiruration data its all in the XML file which can be remotely stored, so a fresh image with the "correct host name for the site" is all that needed.