The SD card in my OSMC RPi died the day before yesterday, very unexpectedly, I might add, and of course I did not have a backup. I first thought that the Pi itself was gone, but it seems it is only the SD card. After some reading I’ve done on this subject this occurrence may be due to the fact that the number of read and write cycles an SD card can process is limited, and a card failure is eventually to be expected.
This is why I was thinking whether I could move OSMC to a USB flash drive instead. I realise that the Pi still needs to have its boot partition on the SD card, but apparently everything else can be moved to and run from a USB drive. I found these instructions on how to run Raspbian from a USB drive. I am not very ‘techy’, and certainly not proficient in Linux, but I can follow clear instructions, so can I use these very same instructions to run OSMC from a USB drive, too? Or are there any other steps I need to follow?
Thank you very much for your help.
Do a forum search on usb install - this will give a number of instances which should answer your question.
Derek
Thanks, Derek, brilliant!
SD cards do have theoretical limits to the number of write cycles (no limit on read cycles) that they can sustain, but on a good quality card and with typical use it would work out to many many years of constant use.
So it’s very unlikely to have failed due to excessive writes, it’s simply failed, period, like any electronic device can. There are lots of cheap and nasty SD cards out there on places like Ebay that are of very low quality, not to mention a lot of counterfeits - it’s best to stick with name brand cards sourced from trustworthy retailers to be sure that you’re getting a good card. (I’ve read that something like 20% of the “Sandisk” SD cards sold on ebay are actually counterfeits)
It could have just been bad luck of course. I’ve got half a dozen SD cards that I use for testing OSMC on different devices, as well as having used Raspbmc personally for a couple of years and I’m yet to have any SD cards fail on me, but they are all name brand cards from reputable retailers like modmypi.
Thanks a lot for your good explanation and for making all of this clear to me. It was a Kingston card, which I believe to be a reputable brand, that I obtained from a reliable source. But be that as it may, I don’t really want to experience any data loss all over again if a card should fail in the future, so is there any method how I can backup the SD card?
Are you sure sdcard is permanently dead?
sdcards can get corrupted (e.g. if power is removed at an unfortunately time).
You should be able to resinstall easily.
Once up and running you should back up just in case.
Many ways of doing this, but windisk32imager is an easy way:
https://rpi.tnet.com/project/faqs/backups/backingup
I use the backup addon and windisk32imager. Early on I had a lot of trouble with failed cards, some of it due to how I handled them I’m sure. I then hooked it into Trakt to keep track of what I’ve watched. Getting back up and running isn’t too painful.