I’m looking for a reliable OH installation that runs for years in a small environment.
The weak point in a Raspberry is the SD-Card.
This device looks promising:
https://revolution.kunbus.de/shop/de/revpi-core-3
But the internal memory of 4GB seems to be too small to replace the sd card.
Do you think it’s possible to run the oh core on the 4GB internal space and combine it with an SD for less important features?
I think it could work out the way you described. My 3 weeks old installation (Ubuntu 16.04/openHAB 2.2) uses 3.2 GB of disk space, so the 4GB could be enough dependent on the data stored over the time. And if there is an USB drive attached to store the data, it should be sufficient.
Another possibility for you could be using a raspberry pi in combination with the installation on a USB drive. The SD-Card is used only to hand over the boot to the USB within this scenario.
An USB-Stick won’t be safer than a sd-card.
A SSD could work - but I would prefer the clean look of this embedded solution…
For sure it also works for HDD/SDD attached via USB, but if I get you right, that’s not the direction you want to go.
So back to your idea. I think it will be way enough space for the os, openhab and pretty sure for your openhab-configuration. The hard point to estimate is the space needed over the years. On this topic more information is needed, is there the plan to persist a lot of data, which kind of data (e.g. images) and how is planned to store the data (MySQL, rrd4j, …). And dependend on the available services within the network you could outsource the data persistence (Database server) or maybe implement cron jobs to archive old data to network drives.
for persistence I use an external influxdb - I will disable most of the logfiles.
I don’t exactly how apt updates/upgrades are working with systemspace. I think I have to find out how to mount the sd-card as temp-space for these kind of processes.
You should reduce the number of writes to the possible minimum, see this post.
Easiest is to add a USB stick, but do NOT move the complete system over, just the write-intensive parts.
PS: and to create a clone SD card is still a valid recommendation.
If you are looking alternatives, Intel NUC is one good candidate. For same prize you could get
https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B01MSZTD8N/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?smid=A3JWKAKR8XB7XF&psc=1
https://www.amazon.de/dp/B01N6JQS8C?aaxitk=BbsSZjfiyiF5K0VJxZQtZg&th=1
You could still install and maintain you openHAB installation via openHABian.
It’s take little bit more power (around 10W) than raspberry pi (and similar), but it also more powerfull and support virtualisation, so you could install e.g. Proxmox and you take live snapshot from your openHAB installation.
See more about Proxmox installation from
https://community.openhab.org/t/from-newbie-to-newbie/33431
My thought on the matter is even if you have a system that can stay running for decades you still need backup and restore? All systems fail at some point. So once you have a good backup and restore system in place, what risk are you actually mitigating with an industrial type system like this?
It seems expensive to me and doesn’t seem to actually save you much work or safety.
Personally, I would go with a less expensive solution (e.g. a Pidrive with enclosure) which will cost 25% of that and give you an SSD in a nice combined enclosure with 100+ GB of storage. Or just rely on your backup and restore procedures to deal with failures.
I agree with rich and is also what I always recommend. My OH runs on an RPI3 with a 40gb SSD and has been running quite nicely for years with no corruption so far. 40-60gb SSDs can be had for cheap $$ easily even in Amazon. Backup is important, on any system. Leverage auto backup strats. There are tools and stuff already matured for these. For OH, a simple entire image backup or conf backup should be sufficient.