piPocalypse

Ugh, what a week for computer failures. The Mastodon server I run with Waffles (and by “run” I mean he does all of the hard stuff and pays for it) went down this week and was down for two days and had to by physically rebooted by the data centre staff.

Then this week, my beloved (and eight year old!) RaspberryPi 3 stopped responding. I had to manually retrieve it from the shed where it runs and connect to a monitor and keyboard only to discover it couldn’t boot due to bad sectors.

I run a lot of stuff on that Pi, including a script to get bus times for our local bus stop to drive a kitchen display, some maintenance jobs for my Channels server, and HomeAssistant. I actually had decent notes kept as to what was running on the server, and the scripts were backed up on gitHub, but I effectively need to re-do Home Assistant from scratch, which is a colossal pain in the butt.

Somewhere I had ‘do regular backups of the pi in my Shed’ on my to do list, but I never got around to it, and the little pi just felt so reliable. I did a ton of work trying to recover stuff from the pi’s SD card to no avail.

So now I’m rebuilding the pi from the ground up. First step? Set up backups, which I’m going to do via a basic rsync command on a nightly cron job that will back up my home directory to a drive on my Channels server inside the house.

Folks, we all know it, but please back up your stuff.