log2ram VS PiShrink

Reducing logging, logging to ram and writing to the sdcard once a day helps longevity a lot, especially with quality sd cards.

99% of the time it's the verbose logging of application servers that is the culprit of sdcard failures.

https://github.com/azlux/log2ram

I always use this: https://github.com/azlux/log2ram

If you've got other issues then it's quite likely that lots of small writes from logging and similar has worn out the SD card, mounting the SD card as read only or installing log2ram could prevent it happening to another SD card.

> writing permanent its log files and swap partition

If this is the problem, the solutions are no swap and log2ram https://github.com/azlux/log2ram

I also noticed that Armbian logs to a ramdisk. I didn't investigate the implementation and if its contents survive a reboot.

The only real problems for me are that the SD card will eventually fail no matter what (I mean, much sooner than a SDD or HDD) and that there are basically no Pis at sale at a reasonable price. As a platform it is nearly dead.

For Pi-hole, I have an Rpi Zero with $10 Usb-to-Ethernet adapter, SD-card barely written (with Log2Ram) to avoid wear. Running about 3 years now almost unattended (besides security updates).

In addition to the other helpful suggestions you’ve received, look into using Log2Ram. It does what it sounds like, puts log writes in ram and then writes them to disk on a slower cadence that doesn’t work your SD card that much.

https://github.com/azlux/log2ram

Log files are a bit trickier. I want these to stick around between reboots, so just storing them on a ramdisk wouldn't really work. Thankfully, log2ram solves this problem. Written primarily for Raspberry Pi machines, it works fine on x86-64 laptops. This stores /var/log in RAM but will sync the contents to disk from time to time, ideal for our needs.

There is a small utility, which shrinks the image by omitting the empty space. Then you can write it to any SD card, which the data will fit on. So in your case even on a 2GB card.

backup.sh - this is what makes the image and uses pishrink to shrink it

Depending on what single board computer you are using, you may want to look at PiShrink. This will at least allow you retroactively shrink the image you create to the actual amount of space used.

I was pretty familiar with most of this but I did not know about the "image backup" utility. You may also want to look at PiShrink in your process as well.

I run a full dd to create an image and then run pishrink https://github.com/Drewsif/PiShrink on it. I used to manually size the partition down with gparted and calculate how much to dd and then gparted the new card to expand the partition - too much work. Pishrink does all the work for you and is fast.