How about an external HDD plugged into the Pi? Even a usb stick is better than writing it to the microsd card.

Funny. My WD nas runs linux and the support ended so i've had to upgrade myself with entware... and it's old, so the fan was sized for cooler hard drives, so I cut a hole in the top and screwed on another fan... and WD removed NFS support years ago, so I just mount my shares oversshfs... and i'm currently upping my local security so it's only accessible over wireguard... honestly, I have no idea what it's doing with the hardware raid and the way it mounts drives so i'm tempted to switch over to mergerfs and snapraid...

Basically my legit consumer hardware raid nas is more duct tape and bubblegum than my home built linux nas. Then again, it's easily a decade past its anticipated useful life too.

I guess it is a point of pride.

don't worry I have raid, that's a backup right?

How do I make a backup of my pi and all its settings? I set everything up following guides and am not great with Linux. Is there a way to make like a full clone, so I can just copy paste into a new pi in case?

Also remember to backup before things break. I once diligently backed up a system image before an upgrade. But I backed up a already failed SD card.

and if possible, keep some backups in a separate physical location. House fires or break-ins aren't all that uncommon.

Honestly something that critical probably shouldn't run on a rpi. There are plenty of cheap used thin clients you can buy on eBay that have better performance and reliability. I probably like the thinkcentre micros, but feel and hp have good options too

Try to use overlayfs under raspi-config, I've been running some raspberry pis for years with that (mostly on offsite locations where fixing dead sd cards is not possible)

Updating the pis is a little more work but in some use cases it's worth it

I use an old netbook as Pi-hole. It has a battery so powerouts are not a problem.

Your phone should use the SD card as a WORM drive, which shouldn't cause too much wear. The Pi can't do that if it's the only storage medium present. Still, back up your stuff, just because it's there now doesn't mean it can't be gone in an instant, flash storage usually does in an instant without warning

I've got an RPi with an attached USB 3 SSD, and it works like a charm. Came back without problems after power outage.

Is no NAS though, it runs MySQL and Apache2 with a mediawiki system instead.