Preserving the SD card

One final topic I want to share with you is that of preserving your Raspberry Pi's SD card. SD cards have a finite write cycle, and continuous writing to the card will eventually burn it out. If we're going to be writing lots of log file entries and taking lots of camera images, we will want to protect our SD card in order to maintain the integrity and reliability of our system; using the system RAM instead can help us with this.

Creating a RAM-based file system

Our Raspberry Pi has plenty of fast system RAM available to us (1Gb on the latest models) that isn't susceptible to this write burn-out issue. Therefore, I'm going to show you how to allocate some of it to create a temporary disk in memory, which we can write files to that we don't need kept on the SD card. Such files would include the, quite large, camera image files that will be emailed out of the system— which, therefore, don't need to be stored permanently. You should also consider any log files that are...