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Backing-up Single Board Computer
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
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It might not be applicable to you but in many cases single board computers are used where there is minimal changes in files in day to day basis. For example when used for displaying stuff. For such cases, it is useful to know that after installing all the required stuff, the SD card can be turned into read only mode. This prolongs its life exponentially. Temporary files can still be generated in the RAM and if needed, you can push them to an external storage/FTP through a cron job or something. I have built a digital display with weather/photos/news where beyond the initial install, everything is pulled from the internet. I'm working towards implementing what I've suggested above.
I love that idea, and I'd love to implement that. But I honestly can never figure out how people are working with services that enables the user to change settings (for example, to set their location to get their local weather) while still maintaining a read-only system.
I am still figuring it out since it is my hobby and I'm unable to devote much time to it. But I think it will be something like Ubuntu live disks which enabled you to try Ubuntu by running it from a DVD. You could run anything like web server, save files, settings etc. Only they would not persist after a reboot since every thing was saved in RAM. Only here it'll be a write locked SD card instead of a DVD.
I'm also sure there must be a name for it and step by step tutorial somewhere. If only Google was not so bad these days...
You keep the user-changeable files on a separate filesystem. Whether that’s just a separate partition, or an external disk. Keep the system itself read only, and write-heavy directories like logs and caches in RAM.
That would not be ideal, as I want to keep most logs of the system, and I don't have a syslog server and even if I had one I wouldn't be able to get everything I need... But it is a quite good idea for other usecase and I might do that with my future projects that doesn't need a rw filesystem!