this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
46 points (96.0% liked)

Selfhosted

40359 readers
289 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Unfortunately, I don’t think the Pi supports RAID1.

I haven't ran any Pi with hard drives, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work with software raid on linux.

[–] dan@upvote.au 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

The issue is that I don't think its standard bootloader supports booting from RAID. I guess you could use a MicroSD for booting then have everything else on the RAID1. There's unofficial ways to boot using GRUB, which should work with RAID1 too.

[–] IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Grub supports software raid just fine. The main issue is that you need to modify grub configuration to add bootloader on both drives, but even if you don't it's pretty simple to recreate needed files for second drive when the primary one dies.

[–] dan@upvote.au 2 points 3 months ago

GRUB does, but Raspberry Pis don't use GRUB by default. You should be able to install it, but it's not officially supported.