I am using openHAB 3.3 with openHABian on a Raspberry Pi 4. ZRAM is activated. RRD4J is the default persistence service, no special settings. When I do a controlled reboot (“sudo reboot”) everything works fine, all persistence values are restored.
Today, however, there was an uncontrolled reboot (my fault) and persistence data was restored up to July 21. The last days were lost. I had, however, a backup from yesterday which I could use.
My question is: I could understand that RRD4J because of ZRAM looses some data (maybe some hours) when there is an uncontrolled reboot, but days? Is there a (ZRAM?) setting which stores the data more regularly on the SD card?
ZRAM prevents write access to the SD-Card. This is done via overlay file system (afaik). ZRAM will write all data to SD-Card if rebooting (or shutting down), but this is a “one big write access”. If cutting power there is no way to save data from RAM to SD-Card.
When ZRAM was added to openHABian there was a major problem with ZRAM periodically writing out to disk except at controlled reboots. I don’t know if it got fixed in upstream and never adopted by openHABian or if it’s still broken.
It got fixed and I haven’t seen any reports indicating it wouldn’t work in quite a long time.
No there isn’t.
After a power loss you’ll fall back to the point in time ZRAM was started the last time, usually that’s when the box was (intentionally) booted the last time before.
You can restart ZRAM (and OH) without booting or take daily backups (as recommended).
Hello,
thanks for your clear answer. As a “layman” I thought that ZRAM does only “spare” write cycles for the SD card, yet writes the data to the SD card from time to time. I did not know that it only writes on reboots.
I’m having the exact same situation as in the OP. ZRAM is active. Data is retained on controlled reboot, but not power loss. I’m running an OH 3.4.0 standard installation on RPi 3B+.
If I’m supposed to restore a system backup after each power loss, then there ought to be an automatic restore of last backup upon boot, because uncontrolled may mean that I am not even at home.
Better would be if ZRAM would persist regularly.
If this isn’t even an issue for most, then I should just turn off ZRAM? Because the potential of months of data loss on an unsupervised system (holiday home) is not viable for me.
there is no way to save data from RAM to SD-Card.