So my RPI crashed yesterday

Social
1

Corrupt SD card, the common issue. However, I didn’t have a spare one lying around. And since it was Easter Monday yesterday, all stores were closed :frowning:
So folks, take my advice: keep a spare one on hand at any time!
And make backups of course (I had those).

But the real reason I had to create this topic: after finally being able to get a new SD card, it didn’t take me half an hour to get fully back up and running. HALF AN HOUR. Everything working. Everything.

If you’d buy a commercial home automation system and it crashed, it would probably take the whole day and a lot of frustration to get it back up, with a lot of loose ends to solve the next because you’re tired and have to get up in the morning.

If I’d had the foresight of having that spare SD, it would have taken me about an hour to diagnose the problem and fix it. Ok, an hour and 10 minutes, because it would take me 10 minutes to actually find the darn spare SD card. I can never find anything in this house.

So, to everyone who helped making this possible: you’re all doing a great job. Home Assistant is a professional and mature system, without the downsides of a company owned professional system. Thanks, kudos and keep it up!

PS no, I didn’t buy a spare SD card. I was already planning to migrate to other hardware than the RPI, but bad luck beat me to it.

2 Likes
2

Good to hear! I’m sure some may want to question using SD cards; so, here is my rebuttal: SD Card Reliability.

Also, I can beat your half hour restore time using the method described in the link :wink:

3

I don’t remember exactly how long I had been running with the previous SD card, a Samsung EVO Plus 32GB. It must have been at least 3 years, possibly 4 or even 5. The last time I remember having a corruption was after a short power interruption because a concrete pump truck hit a high voltage power line nearby (that was fun). Looked up the news articles about that incident and that was December 2020. So it was probably then that I bought the Samsung card.

Now I have a UPS of course :slight_smile:

Also, I can beat your half hour restore time using the method described in the link

Up to 30 days of data loss is not acceptable for me. I’m perfectly fine with 30min of setting up and restoring the backup though.

The planned hardware upgrade has 2 reasons:

  1. increase reliability a few notches
  2. I’m starting to make more use of ESPHome and I really like the ease of on-the-fly compilation, but that requires too much of the RPI - for one of my devices I can’t run the compilation because it eats too much RAM

I haven’t figured out yet though what direction to go to exactly.