I recently decided to replace the SD card in my Raspberry Pi and reinstall the system. Without any special backups in place, I turned to rsync to duplicate /var/lib/docker with all my containers, including Nextcloud.
Step #1: I mounted an external hard drive to /mnt/temp.
Step #2: I used rsync to copy the data to /mnt/tmp. See the difference?
Step #3: I reformatted the SD card.
Step #4: I realized my mistake.
Moral: no one is immune to their own stupidity 😂
Much better. SSDs and HDDs do monitor the health of the drives (and you can see many parameters through SMART), while pen drives and SD cards don’t.
Of course, they have their limits which is why raid exists. File systems like ZFS are built on the premise that drives are unreliable. It’s up to you if you want that redundancy. The most important thing to not lose data is to have backups. Ideally at least 3 copies, 1 off site (e.g. on a cloud, or on a disk at some place other than your home).
Though not every fail state is going to show up. If you start seeing weird intermittent behaviour from a drive, for goodness sake find a way to back it up immediately.
My mum’s new nuc started having some issues, SMART showed perfect drive health. After trying a few things to diagnose, I rebooted to run memtest and check for bad ram, and that was the last time it ever booted into windows. Controller or something on the nvme ssd died. Far too expensive to try and repair for data recovery. Thankfully had a… Somewhat recent backup. Not as recent as we would have liked.
