How to format SD card?

Getting Help
1

I want to set up a Restic backup on Linux to an SD card. Now I wonder how to best format the SD card. Simply use Ext2?

2

It is pretty much irrelevant for restic which format you are using.

However I think it is good advice to stick with some modern filesystem your OS supports. EXT4 or BTRFS is good choice for Linux IMO.

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3

Thanks!

My thinking was more that SD cards are generally not designed for too many re-write cycles. I was thinking about Ext2 because it doesn’t do journaling. But, I guess, if we don’t max out the space on the disk, that doesn’t really matter, because of wear leveling. (which has been around since like forever)

4

If you’re going down the route of using an SD card for your backup storage, there’s not much in the ways of getting it right anyway :slight_smile:

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5

A good rule in life: Don’t judge without knowing the setup.

6

I mean you have a point. I don’t like that solution actually, and certainly I don’t trust SD cards. It’s a temporary solution until I’m back in half a year and can insert a proper disk into the machine as backup medium. In the meantime, the backup is to the SD card, and from there it gets synced by Syncthing to a server. And the server has its own backups.

7

I suppose you have considered sending your backups online, to some cheap S3 compatible storage?

8

Indeed, previously, this backup was to a Google cloud storage bucket. I decided to migrate away from that:

  • Access to the bucket is slow. For example restic check on the repo, which is about 70 GB in size, takes about half an hour. Locally, it takes less than five minutes.

  • If payment for the bucket slips, the backup is gone.

  • The backup itself should also be quicker. Sometimes the machine is only turned on briefly, and then the backup should finish as fast as possible.

  • With the current setup, the backup is mirrored to a server by Syncthing. That is my main server, and it gets regularly backed up by itself. If something fails here, I am more likely to catch it than if something fails with the Google cloud storage bucket previously used.

  • From my server, the backup gets synced to my main desktop machine, and of that I regularly do offline backups to magnetic drives, which I never reuse.

So, the new setup is faster and more reliable. I really like Syncthing to keep everything in one place, then Restic for backups.

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