Pretty much any linux hates wild “cuts” by pulling the power plug, which power outage basically is. Linux must be shut down properly, or file corruption can occur pretty quckly. The only proper and safe way is ups, connected to HA (via NUT integration) or similar, which will properly shut down machine when batteries are empty.
1 Like
Pretty much every OS tells you its “best” to shut down cleanly / I don’t see any reason not to under normal circumstances.
Back in the days of ext2 filesystems if you pulled the power the next reboot would force you into a fsck to ensure there were no problems.
I usually do clean shutdowns, but over the (30) years I have been running linux there have probably been over a hundred times where I have cut the power or done a hard restart instead of doing a clean shutdown and I have never lost any data because of it.
TL;DR - I wouldn’t worry yourself too much into buying a UPS if you don’t have a specific need for it.
Well, i did have one or two breaks in my Linux life. But my friend works with Rpi’s proffesionally, he installed hundreds of them in his automations and he does experience occasional crashes because of the power loss. SD card replacement solves the problem.
That’s very true, it’s just that Linux is more “picky” about it than, say, Windows. At least it used to be… perhaps this was “improved”… ? I know that W95 was pretty picky if you pulled USB before you safely ejected it, while now things are way better in this regard.
To be fair I have had almost no experience running Linux off of SD cards:
- Started on spinning magnetic disks.
- Moved on to tiny spinning disks.
- Used some embedded systems on EEPROM
- I have booted systems off of USB, but those ran with compressed RamDisk so at no point would the USB be in an incomplete state.
- Then moved to SSDs
TL;DR - I withdraw my comments with respect to running on SD cards - I have no idea what magic they may be performing shuffling blocks around.