scot
Group: Members
Posts: 15
Joined: Dec. 2006 |
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Posted: Jan. 22 2007,00:09 |
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Funny, I posted a response to this post previously, but it seems to have disappeared.
Firstly, frugal is generally considered quite flash-memory friendly. It does write on shutdown (but only what you tell it to via the ~/.filetool.lst), but other than that it doesn't write ever. That means that any spools, logfiles, web cache or other temp files just get put to ram , and (since they would be excluded from the .filetool.lst) never written to CF/hd. Of course you may not have many of these write-often programs running, so that may not be much of an issue. You don't mention what you will be running. This has considerable bearing on the question. For certain applications, you could make a read-only system, which *never* writes anything to your CF.
Secondly, CF cards are good these days, and don't wear out fast. You wouldn't like to put your web cache onto one, but frugal's write-once policy, they should last a long time.
That said, if you have any quantity of files that don't need to be constantly (re)written, you can easily have a hybrid-frugal system with a persistant home and/or opt. That way system settings and changable things get handled by the frugal backup/restore handling scripts, but your MP3's or PDF's or whatever don't get rewritten to CF anew every time you shutdown.
I don't know how much a DSL/hard drive install writes to the disk, but traditional linux systems write quite a bit (correct me if I'm wrong) to the drive. Anything logging, spooling, caching, puts things (esp to /var or some/tmp), and can add up to a lot of data getting spun out to your card. I think some form of frugal install is almost certainly best for minimizing writes to the CF drive.
Do not consider manually removing the electricity to avoid the backup process of frugal. Rather read and modify the scripts concerned to get them to do what you want. This is much safer. And like I said. If you don't need to change any settings or files in your 'backup' file. You don't even have to rewrite it. This should make for problem free recovery from power outages, since every time you are booting the same system you did the last time.
But perhaps this won't work. It all depends on what you are running.
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