Beginners • Re: Woudln't it make sense to add a reminder to think about a backup in the installer?

Perhaps there should at least be some words about backups in "The Official Raspberry Pi Beginners Guide xth Edition". There are none as far I could find in the 6th.

I like this idea

So it is peoples own responsibility to make their DIY system survive failure. There is no law that someone will come and check at your home to see if backups are OK. The only problem is when there would be too many reports of failure and conclusion that the Pi is just a cheap toy. I have seen several people developed that (strong) opinion already in the past because their Pi (SD-card) got corrupted when running Pi-Hole. Or their PSU ('charger') did nasty things.

There are CM3/4/5s that are used in professional products, so the RPi is not considered a toy. But I agree that one target audience for the RPi is children, students, etc., and therefore RPis could be considered toys. I don't consider RPis to be toys, like the people who use RPis for their home automation. I agree that it is their job to make their system robust. But since there are already various powerful home automation tools and good documentation on how to set up the system, more and more people are using these tools and only realize they forgot to think about robustness when their system crashes for the first time.

Also a 'reminder to backup' message too prominently displayed might get people to think that the RPi is unreliable or so. Just wrote an SD-card and then already worry about things going wrong. People with enough background in embedded or Linux etc know their way. ... Other ARMs (Android smartphones) pump the settings into the cloud, so maybe many do not realize enough that a 35 dollar computer is their own responsibility (they can't pay with their privacy for having cloud backups).

Good point. Perhaps the installation program is too conspicuous for this. Especially since this message is displayed every time a system is created.

However, I now think it would be very helpful if a corresponding note were included in the RPi documentation. I also think it would be very useful to include a prominent note about backups in the relevant home automation tool installers instead of in the RPi installer. But this forum is not the right place to discuss that.

I just feel sorry for the people who have put a lot of effort into setting up their home automation system and suddenly find themselves facing a mess because they didn't think about backing it up.
I don't want to know how many people don't back up their laptops either. But I think the probability of the system becoming unusable is much lower in that case.

Statistics: Posted by framp — Tue Jan 13, 2026 6:57 pm

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