Go back up your HA installation right now.
I, like many others, was running HA OS on a raspberry pi with whatever sd card I happened to have at hand at the time when I started to play with the whole thing.
It has since became a part of my household with light automations and other stuff and with everything going on in life it’s been on a back burner to impove automations more, include more data, manage proper backups and so on. And specially the backups are the one I’ve been slacking on and now I have no one else to blame than myself.
Sd card eventually died yesterday evening and today when I started to study why the server went down but still responded to ping I was greeted with a docker error that exec format is wrong (or something along those lines). At first I thought that maybe some upgrade went sideways and decided to grab a image of the card before messing around it so I have something to come back to which failed almost immediately with IO errors on dmesg.
Gladly I could get a backup off from the card from october, so at worst I lost some automation tweaks on HA side but what I’m still afraid is that I might’ve lost Z-wave keys. Ddrescue is running on the card right now so I don’t have the final results yet but I’m not too hopeful that it’ll create a working image.
So, I did what I should’ve done already ages ago and installed HA on my proxmox server and added that to backup cycle so that’s been taken care of properly and now I’m not limited to Rpi3 performance with addons either. I still need to get a new installation for the pi with Z-wave JS due to RaZberry 7 hat but that should be pretty straightforward task, assuming I can retrieve the keys from broken card.
So: Don’t be like me, verify that you have proper backups of your stuff.
SD cards are mostly designed for use cases that do very little writing. There’s high endurance SD cards, but those are designed for long continuous writes (mainly for dashcams and security cameras). Home Assistant does a lot of small writes, which is the worst case scenario for an SD card.
Back when I used a Pi for Home Assistant, I had a SATA SSD attached to it using a cable like this: https://a.co/d/2tlYZW2.
These days I’d probably try a USB NVMe drive, like a SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD or similar product. NVMe drives were a bit iffy with the older Pis since some of them pull way more power than SATA SSDs and the Pi couldn’t always handle them, but it should be fine with the newer ones.
If you don’t have any offsite backups yet, I’d get a storage VPS (look for good deals on LowEndTalk on Black Friday!) or Hetzner storage box and back up to it using Borgbackup and Borgmatic.
@dan @IsoKiero Home assistant running on a pi with a 1TB NVME SSD seamlessly integrated. :) Why 1TB? Might as well. Although Immich and such stores directly on my NAS, so it’s mostly empty.
I didn’t realise that the Pi 5 has an NVMe hat! Is that what you did? It’s a great solution.