I live in a part of the world where powercuts are pretty frequent. 1 per day is normal. They last between 1 and 8 hours. A day without powercuts feels like a special occasion.
My machine is powered by a desktop ups which is terrible. It is only supposed to power everything for a few minutes to shutdown safely. But it is cheap and I don’t know much about other affordable alternatives.
How do you folks who self host at home deal with powercuts? Any recommendations? 8 hours of uptime from a ups sounds almost impossible or totally unaffordable to me.
You can boot from the SSD directly btw
I know, and from network, but I haven’t put time into enabeling that. (and I have loads of < 1G SD cards that need to be used up anyway)
A new RPI should have USB boot enabled out of the box. I know the first year after release you had to update the firmware to get it working, but iirc that is no longer needed. Just burn the image to the stick instead of the SD card and it’s plug and play.
Interesting to know. As of which version? RPi 4? I have to admit, I never tried it.
I’m pretty sure rpi3 as well.
When I started it worked out of the box on rpi3 already and a year after rpi4 came on the market the firmware was updated to support it there as well. New pis ship with recent Firmware, so they work out of the box, early rpi4 might need flashing.
You’ll find plenty of tutorials if you Google “RPI 3/4 USB boot”. I run mine from a SSD in a sata-usb adapter. The storage space and peace of mind, not having to fear corruption is definitely worth it (also SSDs are dirt cheap right now (just make sure you have an adapter that supports all block device access modes if you need all the speed you can get, there is one that is not always supported by the adapter)).
(Edit: sorry, only talking about the B+ variant! I don’t have experience with other variants)