Save your disk, write files directly into RAM with /dev/shm

An assumption I’ve been revisiting is if I really do need to be writing to disk all the time. I can’t remember the last time I actually had a crash or other event where I would have abruptly lost my work.

I’m wondering if I can completely hide away the detail where I can work exclusively in memory (even when I habitually save my code) and “reconcile” as some task I do before shutdown.

In fact, that doesn’t even feel necessary… I git push my day’s work a number of times. None of that needs a local disk. And 64GB of memory was surprisingly affordable.

You might be interested in Tiny Core Linux [0], then, especially piCore. After the initial read from the persistent media, everything is in RAM, the entire filesystem. You are working exclusively in memory until and unless you run a specific command to save everything you care to save back to that media again.

I have it running on a Raspberry Pi so that my already sparingly-used SD card's lifespan gets extended to, hopefully, several years. I have never seen the green writing LED light blink on without me specifically triggering it.

I primarily use it as a cronslave [1]. It has ~50 separate cronjobs on it by now, all wheedling away at various things I want to make happen for free on a clock. But if you live out of a terminal and could spend your days happily inside tmux + vim or emacs -nw, there's nothing stopping you from just doing this. Feels a lot like driving stick shift.

[0]: http://tinycorelinux.net/

[1]: https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/posts/consider-the-...