> and all I can think of is that damned SD card...
I'm having some better experiences with SD cards marketed as "high endurance". Another trick I've been doing is to mount /var/log as tmpfs. If they crash when they run out of space, I let them restart themselves.
I've heard that you also should care about optimizing the quality of the power supply since power fluctuations or brownouts are apparently what actually kills SD cards. Personally, I just use USB drives because they can boot off of that now, and I treat the device as semi-disposable and assume that I'm going to reimage its thumb drive every few months.
To be honest I don't have that much issues (used to have much more with older SD card, pre-micro), but still, imagine a Raspberry Pi 4, 8 GB ram, and an nvme (m.2) hard drive. It would be soooo nice. I know there are compute module based products that do something like this, but imaging a 65 dollar pi with this slot.
I'm having some better experiences with SD cards marketed as "high endurance". Another trick I've been doing is to mount /var/log as tmpfs. If they crash when they run out of space, I let them restart themselves.