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I am a new user to openenergymonitor and emoncms, so pardon if this is old news.

I was reading a lot on the board about various problems with read/write cycles for the SD card, and also when i registered for emoncms it said that this service was only free for now, but due to running costs a small fee might be added later. In the long term these are problems that needs permanent fix.

Solving the problem brought my thinking back to the happy -90s when i was running my 68k mac computers with the OS on a RAM disk. This was really fast.

And i came to the conclusion that raspbian probably can run ram disk for storing the emoncms data as well..

So, logging data to a RAM disk, on the new raspberry2 with 1gig of storage will be pretty good. A lot of logging can be done on all this space. Since all this data will be lost in case of power loss or system crash, regular backup and permanent logging to some kind of solid, durable media is needed.

Later when there is need to backup this data for permanent storage, this can be done periodically.

The data can then be uploaded to a dropbox account for long term storage.

Doing some searching on the web i found out that the basics are already there in raspbian, but someone with a lot of skills need to do the code.

This solution gives a lot of benefits.

- Long time storage, free from risk with accidents, computer failure, computer theft, fire, unit failure.

- Access ability world wide

- Sharing data

- One point storage for many units

- Easy platform independent access

- Best of all.. Free of charge!

Some problems will occur due to slow read/write speeds and access time on dropbox. But maybe this will be a small issue if the RAM disk is used to store the last 512+ megabytes of data locally.

This is just an idea, a way to combine available technology into something new that we might need.

What do you guys think, is this a possible and needed feature or not necessary for the community?

Adding this link to similar topic for cross reference:

http://openenergymonitor.org/emon/node/10838