"Dennis Lee Bieber"  wrote in message
news:gajjqe913b978975mqsffvgnrj0gjbog8i@4ax.com...
> You probably want that hard-drive even more if you don't have a UPS...
> Having a hard power-drop on a Linux file system can corrupt it -- putting
> the active data on a hard-drive rather than the same SD card the OS is
> running from may make recovery easier (it takes some tricks to fsck the
> running partition(s), but with all variable data on a hard-drive you can
> boot with hard-drive dismounted, fsck it, then mount it for use).

I've been *very* lucky. My Pi runs Rasbian Stretch with the default ext4
filesystem on the SD card. I've had a *lot* of power cuts over the past few
months, either due to high-voltage faults on the feed to the village, or the
RCD tripping during recent building work. And every time the Pi has booted
up normally and quickly (*). Mind you, my Windows 7 PC (NTFS) has been
subjected to the same power cuts and it too has recovered perfectly - only a
couple of times has it needed to chkdsk the system drive.

In fact the only time I ever had the system drive go bad, preventing the Pi
from booting, was after a tidy "reboot" which should have shut things down
gracefully. I now take an image of the SD card every month or so, which will
let me hit the ground running (although with out-of-date data) more quickly
than having to reinstall Raspbian and customise the Pi the way I want it.
And I back up user data every couple of days - weather-station readings and
PVR scheduled TV recordings: I moved those always-on tasks from Windows to
Pi the other year so my Windows PC doesn't have to stay on 24/7.


(*) I don't have a screen connected to the Pi, and my only access is by
PuTTY or VNC remote desktop, so I don't see the boot-up messages, but the Pi
is back so quickly that it doesn't have time to fsck the disk, so evidently
it's never needed to.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05