"Pancho"  wrote in message
news:rve3fb$vsl$1@dont-email.me...
> On 03/02/2021 11:44, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
>
>>> Pedant.
>>
>> Specifically, a pedant who didn’t lose anything when his Pi’s SD card
>> failed without warning the other day.
>>
>
> Surely you lost the SD card?

Not necessarily. It may have been that the boot files on the SD card became
corrupted but the card was still capable of storing data once the card was
restored from a disk image.

This happened to me once with my Pi3. It had rebooted many times. There
hadn't been a power cut since the last time it had successfully booted (ie
unlikely to have failed to flush buffers). I hadn't installed any software
updates since the last successful boot. But a normal "Reboot", like I'd done
many times before, failed very early on in the boot process. I couldn't find
any workaround for the error message that I got, so I had to reinstall
everything - from NOOBS onwards. It was after this that I wrote a crib sheet
of all the customisations I'd made and software I'd installed, and I make a
fresh disk image (shutdown, moved SD card to Windows PC, run
Win32DiskImager, move card back to PI and reboot) every few months. I didn't
lose any user data (apart from the configurations of channels in the
TVHeadend PVR software) because all the data (TV recordings) are stored on a
separate spinning HDD rather than on the SD card. I also back up those
recordings using SyncToy on Windows, accessing them via SMB share.

It's the only time I've had a failure like this. I've carried on using the
same SD card for several years since and it's never gone wrong again.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05