Frequent power outages - any tips to better prepare for this

[mharizanov]

Guys, where I live we have frequent power outages. I have damaged numerous SD cards and to some degree lost my faith in the Pi's reliability. Any tips on how to make the system more "rugged"? Maybe disabling swap file? any tips are welcome
Thanks

[Jim JKla]

Sounds like you need either a battery powered RPi or a UPS.

You could run your RPi from a car battery hookup with a trickle charger on the battery.

The system would at least give youtime to shut down your RPi gracefully.

[mharizanov]

I thought about this too, but that's not so mobile.. and not so cheap.

What I meant is to take measures in the OS itself to reduce the risk of data loss to some reasonable extent..if possible.

[Jim JKla]

You have to remember the RPi is designed primarily as a teaching platform.

In about a year we will have (hopefully) loads of kids applying latteral thinking will come up with new ways of doing things.

There is no way of telling what answers we will have then.

What is your timescale?

[mharizanov]

nothing urgent, just recovering from another failed SD crd, hence the frustration

[tonyhughes]

Guys, where I live we have frequent power outages. I have damaged numerous SD cards and to some degree lost my faith in the Pi's reliability.

How is the Pi considered unreliable if the issue is down to your acknowledged frequent power outages?

If you had a top-end HP/IBM enterprise class server, with redundant everything, you would still have exactly the same problem without some form of battery backup.

Buy a UPS.

[mharizanov]

Guys, where I live we have frequent power outages. I have damaged numerous SD cards and to some degree lost my faith in the Pi's reliability.

How is the Pi considered unreliable if the issue is down to your acknowledged frequent power outages?

If you had a top-end HP/IBM enterprise class server, with redundant everything, you would still have exactly the same problem without some form of battery backup.

Buy a UPS.

true
I guess I will have to go for that.

Anyway, my expectation was that some guru would recommend a solution like read-only filesystem with RAM disks mounted over the directories that have to be read-write, but I guess that may be hard to achieve

[tonyhughes]

RAM disks won't stop your data from being lost, it will only prevent SD card corruption, but add a layer of complexity (also knowing as 'geeking yourself into a corner'.

150VA or 300VA UPS would solve your problem the right way, and let you get on with life

[Jim JKla]

They are getting cheaper all the time