1y ago

RaspberryPi NAS problems be like

67 comments

I know that making networks out of duct tape and bubblegum is a point of pride in the Linux community, but if you have to store vital data, wouldn't a nice hardware NAS and a RAID array be a better solution?
- How about an external HDD plugged into the Pi? Even a usb stick is better than writing it to the microsd card.
  
  My brain didn't even register that the meme was about NAS data residing on the SD card. I automatically assumed it's on attached disks and was about to snark-reply about keeping a cloned SD card taped to the Pi case for such occasions.
  
  Either go big or go home. RAID or bust.
- Funny. My WD nas runs linux and the support ended so i've had to upgrade myself with entware... and it's old, so the fan was sized for cooler hard drives, so I cut a hole in the top and screwed on another fan... and WD removed NFS support years ago, so I just mount my shares oversshfs... and i'm currently upping my local security so it's only accessible over wireguard... honestly, I have no idea what it's doing with the hardware raid and the way it mounts drives so i'm tempted to switch over to mergerfs and snapraid...
  Basically my legit consumer hardware raid nas is more duct tape and bubblegum than my home built linux nas. Then again, it's easily a decade past its anticipated useful life too.
  I guess it is a point of pride.

Backups people backups. You don't realize how much you want them until it's too late to make them.
- don't worry I have raid, that's a backup right?
  
  Raid 0 right? I heard the number stands for how much risk there is of losing data.
  
  No, the backup goes after the raid when something goes wrong.
  Wait, I thought you're talking about that SWAT team outside your house.
  
  If 3-2-1 is a good backup strategy, RAID (non-zero) is like 0.5 at best. Maybe 0.6 if your config can handle 2 simultaneous drive failures
- How do I make a backup of my pi and all its settings? I set everything up following guides and am not great with Linux. Is there a way to make like a full clone, so I can just copy paste into a new pi in case?
  
  https://raspibackup.linux-tips-and-tricks.de/en/home/
  This tool is incredible
  
  Yeah, I think the same software you used to image your SD card can be used to make an image from your SD card.
  
  Copy the entire SD card (both partitions) with a tool like dd to a file.
- Also remember to backup before things break. I once diligently backed up a system image before an upgrade. But I backed up a already failed SD card.
  
  Also remember to test your backup system.
  Setting up an intricate backup process is great, until an actual emergency happens and it turns out you can't put Humpty-Dumpty back together
- and if possible, keep some backups in a separate physical location. House fires or break-ins aren't all that uncommon.
  
  A good advice, but most regular people don't seem to bother with rotating physical off-site storage mediums so I advocate automated (and encrypted) backups to a cloud or something as well.

If you must use an SD card: use log2ram. Greatly reduces the number of IO operations to the card and prolongs its life.

LPT: pies since at least the 3b can boot from USB.

I’ve never relayed to a meme more. I moved my UPS to my work computer after that one failed and three days later, I lost power. Spent five hours fixing a corrupted SD card then reconfiguring my Pi-Hole and HomeBridge.

M.2 sata to usb enclosure
- I just bought this, we'll see how easy it is to setup. Do you still run raspian on it, or something else?
  
  Very easy. https://www.makeuseof.com/boot-raspberry-pi-4-via-ssd-network/
  I used to run Fedora, now openSUSE on mine.
  
  I run ubuntu server on my RPi 4 with USB3 SSD. No issues so far, but needs a good PSU. Survived a blackout without an issue.

Full redundant JBOD backup. It's unfancy and safe.

Not quite the same, but I made the mistake of using my RPi to run my home server and NAS off of an external USB non-NAS (i.e., not intended to be running 24/7) drive...with no backup or redundancy. The drive actually lasted a good long while, but it did die, and very suddenly, a couple of months ago. And now I've lost all my stuff that was on it. Still holding out hope I can figure out a way to recover the drive, but yeah.
Back up your shit, yo.
- Is it an HDD? Those are quite easy to recover, just put the disk into a working HDD
  
  Sorry I'm not sure what you mean. Yes it's an HDD. A USB plug-in one in a non-user-serviceable enclosure. I can't (without completely destroying it) get the HDD itself out. And I'm not sure what it would even mean to put it into a working HDD. The broken HDD itself is the problem, I think.

This has happened several times to my Pi-Hole. Even with backups, trying to get my network back online still takes too long. I haven't found a good solution for resilience yet.
- Honestly something that critical probably shouldn't run on a rpi. There are plenty of cheap used thin clients you can buy on eBay that have better performance and reliability. I probably like the thinkcentre micros, but feel and hp have good options too
  
  Pis can be supremely reliable when used correctly for the purpose. E.g. use high quality SD cards and don't write to them much, or a good quality SSD if you have to do significant writes, use an official or better PSU, etc. My oldest 4 is from 2019 and it's been in continuous use since then. It used to be a NAS running a 2-disk mirror exported over NFS. These days it's a gigabit OpenWrt router with SQM. It's still in the original SD card.
- Try to use overlayfs under raspi-config, I've been running some raspberry pis for years with that (mostly on offsite locations where fixing dead sd cards is not possible)
  Updating the pis is a little more work but in some use cases it's worth it
  
  I think something like BTRFS might be a better solution as overlayfs seems to freeze the system image state. Something which is copy on write (COW) seems like it would be more resilient and still provide an RW file system. To do it right would probably be a combination of the two with the data partition BTRFS and the system image partition overlayfs.
- I use an old netbook as Pi-hole. It has a battery so powerouts are not a problem.

https://raspibackup.linux-tips-and-tricks.de/en/home/
Regular unattended backups in seconds using hardlinks. Honestly, it doesn’t get any better.

Pfft, mine boots from a USB SSD, and since my services are all containerized I just gzip the directory with all my docker-compose files and volumes and chuck it into B2 every 6 hours

My phones sd card died this weekend. Fuuck. Still trying to recover the data somehow. Can relate..
- SD card clone taped on the box, USB disks and ZFS. Mirror works well. You could try a 3-4 disk RAIDz1 through a USzb hub if you're feeling ambitious.

damn, I was thinking on that these days: a way to create a little NAS solution based on Raspberry Pi , but with some SSD/HDD disks attached, not just the SD card XD (however I find the SD cards quite reliable so far in my phone, I would need to try a Raspberry for myself )
- Your phone should use the SD card as a WORM drive, which shouldn't cause too much wear. The Pi can't do that if it's the only storage medium present. Still, back up your stuff, just because it's there now doesn't mean it can't be gone in an instant, flash storage usually does in an instant without warning
- I've got an RPi with an attached USB 3 SSD, and it works like a charm. Came back without problems after power outage.
  Is no NAS though, it runs MySQL and Apache2 with a mediawiki system instead.
  
  I had an Odroid running a NAS (WD RED drive) configured to do everything in memory instead of writing to the SD card and it still died after a few months.

Why are 5v ups's not a common thing?
- They are, kinda. You can buy a power bank that can be charged and still output energy
  
  They are? ~~Hours~~how do I look for one? Never seen one that could do that, mine certainly doesn't.

67 comments