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I have a super small drive on my ultraportable lenovo 100s. I want to sync several gb of stuff from my dropbox onto it, so I have equipped it with a western digital purple sd card.

I plan to use that media as the storage device on which I will put my dropbox folder.

I am seeking advice on which filesystem to use given the possibly frequent refresh (read/write) activity of dropbox and the nature of sd card (not as resistent as hard drive). I am running a 32-bit Rapberry Pi OS, based on Debian 11.

I am aware of this but it is a bit dated and not specific to my use case.

Rho Phi
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2 Answers2

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Whatever file-system you may use, be aware that SD cards are fragile. Do not expect to use your card for a long time, and be prepared for it to fail without notice.

Most file-systems will do, as long as you disable journaling. Your card itself does wear-leveling, so this is not required in the file-system and you could pick one that is simple and efficient.

You may find some information in the post Best File system for microSD used for snapshots & storage, where a user detailed some statistics about his (terribly cheap) SD cards that he used extensively:

  • EXT4 with journaling - 7 days
  • EXT4 w/o journaling - 12 days
  • BTRFS - 6 months
  • Read-only BTRFS with APT wrapper - survived 2 years, exceeding the test length

Seems like BTRFS is a good match. If you intend to use the card on non-Linux computers, exFAT will do.

harrymc
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  • Thanks a lot for chiming in. I am a bit confused though from the redit post you linked. First of all I did not share at all the same trouble with Raspberry Pi and SD cards. I have run 4/5 raspberri pi 24/7 for years doing several things (printer server, home assistant, vpn server, media player, ... ) and burned SD cards only after years ... – Rho Phi Jul 29 '23 at 19:24
  • For the other aspects discussed in that post I clearly see the fundamental reason why journaling affects the endurance of the card, but I do not see why BTRFS should stress less the SD card than ext4 without journaling. On the opposite it seems to me that copy-on-write in BTRFS may produce more writes than a fs without copy-on-write. – Rho Phi Jul 29 '23 at 19:27
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    These are empirical results of an unknown person. For my money, you should use the most primitive file-system possible that will just write once and do nothing else. ExFAT is certainly primitive, but I don't know how well it would serve in your context. – harrymc Jul 29 '23 at 20:19
  • I think I share the sentiment of going basic here, and was indeed considering exFAT as an option after your comment. As a matter of fact data is coming from dropbbox here and synced to it on the fly all the time, so its backup is guaranteed and instantaneous. On that side I am safe. I just want to avoid to overly wear a 50 bucks SD card too often... – Rho Phi Jul 30 '23 at 08:35
  • The maker states "Capacities up to 1TB1. WD Purple microSD cards are built with advanced 96-layer 3D NAND technology, ensuring high performance, reliability, and endurance." and other seemingly reassuring phrases "WD Purple SC microSD cards are designed for continuous 24/7 recordingshould cameras lose connection with the NVR, providing additional confidence in your security video solution." – Rho Phi Jul 30 '23 at 08:37
  • Does it make sense to use `time badblocks -sv /dev/mmcblk0p2 -o mmcblk0p2.log` to follow the evolution of badblocks as suggested [here](https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/251/how-can-i-determine-when-an-sd-card-needs-replacement)? – Rho Phi Jul 30 '23 at 08:50
  • I see some OS level (Debian 11 for me) info that may contain useful info in `/sys/block/mmcblk2/integrity/` and neighboring folders ... who knows ... more info [here](https://www.cameramemoryspeed.com/sd-memory-card-faq/reading-sd-card-cid-serial-psn-internal-numbers/) – Rho Phi Jul 30 '23 at 09:01
  • WD Purple are good quality and not too pricey and your usage pattern sounds low enough. I suggest to just take the plunge. – harrymc Jul 30 '23 at 09:30
  • Dropbox for linux does not work with exFAT. I have not seen it written anywhere ... until I run it and changed the dropbox folder to the exFAT partition. Dropbox only runs on ext4 partitions. So I have made an ext4 partition and I have disabled journaling. – Rho Phi Jul 30 '23 at 21:25
  • I am up-voting your comments, but the answer has to do with dropbox being able to work only with ext4, so I have answered my own question. – Rho Phi Aug 01 '23 at 09:14
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It turns out that Dropbox works only with Ext4 on 32-bit systems, so the question has only one answer due to the limitation of dropbox on linux. BTRFS was not listed by my dropbox gui as an actually available option.

Rho Phi
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