Greg, et. al. who have done a card replacement:
If you pull a working card from the Pi and do an image of it with a different computer, I assume you can just plug the new card in and continue along with the life of the new card, or so I hope. I'm approaching a year on my wx system running WeeWx, and if it fails, I literally would have to start from ground zero. I'd rather spend a couple days fiddling with new stuff than trying to capture the system the way I have it installed and running now.
Did you find, with your reading, any specific SD cards that are more reliable/robust/better choice than the SanDisk that comes with some of the RaspPi kits?
I'm still hoping to keep the almost invisible profile of a self contained Pi. To hang another powered USB box, with it's wall wart and the external drive seems to add to the clutter. And an external USB drive as shown in some of the linked articles is a mechanical device, drawing power and I'm not sure designed to spin all day, day in and day out. So in addition to the pile of electronics and the extra power strip wall wart and all, am not sure if it isn't better to just do SD card swaps, not knowing when one will fail, vs. wasting a card with an unknown time to failure when you plug in the next SD card.
A USB stick seems to be relatively small, not require more power from parts dangling and plugged into their own supply and so on. Is the memory technology in them able to have many more writes than the SD card technology?
I'd spring for a little SSD but those are SATA based and there seems no provision to hang one onto a Pi
Finally, once the new alternative storage has been selected, is there an easy way to migrate things to the new configuration, or is it better to just bite the bullet and do the time-consuming new install on new storage system/Raspbian set up?
All very concerning as to the amount of work to get this done with the Achilles heel of the SD card life at the root of all this.
Dale