How to manage a lot of SD-cards within a team

balenaEtcher
1

This might be a quite unusual post and i am not sure if this is the right place for this, but i would like to share how we manage a lot of SD-cards in our team.

Disclaimer: I know balena solves a lot of the issues why someone would need such a system. But with persistent volume claims there is still a small need for keeping track of individual SD-cards.

With in my team i often saw SD cards in the office, that did not seem to have an owner, but i still was to afraid to format them. Therefore i left them where there are and we soon run into SD-card shortages.
Therefore, we looked into ways to mange SD cards and we found simple coin collectors album to do the job.

We have to of them: one with SD-cards that are not used anymore and can be formated and another where everyone needs to store their sd-cards with a little note on the side. Therefore every SD-card that is not in a device or in this book of SD-cards can be formatted :grimacing:

IMG_3737
IMG_37371500×2000 106 KB
IMG_5799
IMG_57992091×2392 108 KB

We bought the cheapest once that fit a 10ct € coin and they can hold micro SD-cards safely.

3

Hi @Langhalsdino, I moved your topic to the balenaEtcher category as it will get more visibility there and is kinda related to it.

One idea that I have while reading your post is that this issue could be facilitated digitally as well. The SD card UUID could be used as identifier. For example a mapping could be created between the UUID and created balena devices (which could be enumerated through the balena API).

I also struggle with this on a micro level since I am regularly flashing devices for test purposes and have to deal with multiple SD cards simultaneously. It is a very good idea to organize those in such a way.