Newbie: Longlife SD Card and HDD Questions

[Neand1980]

Hello,

im really new to Raspberry Pi and Arm Linux but i have a Question regarding the Lifetime of SD Card an HDD. As i know, SD Cars are limited in its write cycles. To expand the Lifetime of the SD Card, i boot from a SD Card and additionally have some things outsourced to a HDD on USB. This belongs to all the things where i think, there is a lot of write and read cycles, like MySQL Database, Samba Shares and so on. However i think all Logs are written to the SD Card. Is there a way to outsource them also to HDD, makes this some sense? Or are the write cycles not so that big problem?

BTW: Is there a way to make a complete Backup the SD Card, while the System keeps running and restore this Backup later in Case of a failure? Maybe something like: Make complete Backup other Midnight to the HDD for the first and a Diff Backup (for changed files only) in the following cycles? I know i can copy all the files with rsync, but will such a rsync copy completely restore to a running system?

[joximus]

Consider relocating /var or /var/log to HDD. That is what I did.