Pine64 Dead

[pfeerick]

Another tip, you can backup the SD card by reversing the burn process.  Once I get my SD cards working the way I want them to I use the DD command to write the card back out to my image server.  If I blow a card I'm back up and running without a hitch in about twenty minutes.

That is really good advice! I do the same after making any major changes to the pine64 configuration, as you just never know when something bites back! I use 'USB Image Tool' on windows to the the backups as it is easy to use and has the ability to both save to and read compressed (zipped) image files, making the 4/8/16GB images a bit easier to manage

MicroSD cards  (and their full sized cousins) have a limited number of write cycles meaning that constantly writing data to the MicroSD card makes it more and more likely that it will pack up. A lot of them do have wear levelling to ensure the same block of memory isn't continuously written too, which makes them last a lot longer. However, anything from a freak cell failure in just the wrong spot, or a power outage causing file system corruption can ruin you day. With these SoC boards and microSD cards, a backup of a acceptable recovery point is essential! I've had one board going for about 3 years now (not a pine, a different one), and thankfully it seems to be coping with 24x7 duty as a network share drive with regular usage without any major issues. I still have a backup of the boot microSD ready for when it finally fails, just in case