PiAware and how to extend the service life of my SD card

FlightAware ADS-B Flight Tracking
1

I recently acquired a Raspberry Pi 3 and installed PiAware.

I also installed Log2RAM to reduce the number of writes to the SD card, since these tiny SD cards have limited lives.

My questions are:

  1. What files/logs does PiAware write frequently on the SD card?
  2. Is it possible to redirect these frequent writes to Log2RAM or by some other means, write other logs into RAM? Configuration changes would, of course, still need to be written on the SD card in order to survive a reboot.
2

Directly? Nothing.

Logging goes via journald; that is then handled by journald / syslogd and usually ends up being written to /var/log but that’s up to your syslogd config.

Status files and PID files go to /run/piaware which is in RAM

Everything else that piaware can write is not written frequently and needs to be on the sdcard anyway (location data, feeder ID, etc)

1 Like
3

Very good. That is all I need to know.

4

i am using the same card in my first receiver which is operational since June 2019 without any issues.

If it’s for feeding only, i would’t care that much. There are other Pi-Projects which write way more often to an SD card.
Simply create a backup image once you’re done and you can replace it within minutes.

Or (if you do frequent changes without wanting to bring the Raspi down) there is a script available here in the discussion forum to do it online on a scheduled basis

5

I am using same 8 Gb cards since 2016 in two of my Pis. Never bothered about log2ram or log-rotate.

1 Like
6

I have log2ram installed, but it might be not needed.

Currently my main Raspberry is running since several months as

  • ADS-B Receiver
  • VRS DB Collector and Broadcaster
  • WeeWX Server
  • Aircraftlist collector from AirSquitter

Disk IO and bandwidth are not worth talking about

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