rpi-clone VS log2ram

I've been running a bunch of Pi's for years now, and the biggest problem I've had is the Pi itself dying: 24/7 usage is hard on a small device. I've also found that stable power is essential, and to that end I've always used 5v 3a branded power cubes, plugged into a pure sine wave UPS. Choice of micro-SDHC cards is important and I ended up getting ATP industrial cards (https://www.atpinc.com/products/industrial-sd-cards) - expensive but really long-lived. Finally, using RPi-clone (https://github.com/billw2/rpi-clone) on a regular basis has been a life-saver. I clone to Sandisk Extreme micro-SDHCs and can recover from an outage in minutes.

I would normally use the Pi SD-Card copier to duplicate the SD-Card to an SSD but I'm unsure if this is available on the Ubuntu image - you could possibly use this program [Github] if you are not keen on using dd with a running system.

Then you will need to clone the SD to the SSD, you can use many tools that are available from your desktop computer or you can try with rpi-clone, just connect the SSD with Pi booted from SD, stop any possible service/docker to prevent any copy error and run, adapting device naming but usually will be (check device with dmesg):

I used rpi-clone, it was super easy. Whole process took 10 minutes. https://github.com/billw2/rpi-clone

rpi-clone

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.