I ran 20 pi's at work for years and had one failure. I've run my irrigation system off a pi for 4 years without a problem. I may be the anomaly and I don't live in Death Valley.
When you have an image that you're happy with, back it up. Using a USB<->SD card reader on a linux machine, run gparted to slim the image down to the minimum, then run something like this
When you have an image that you're happy with, back it up. Using a USB<->SD card reader on a linux machine, run gparted to slim the image down to the minimum, then run something like this
Where `/dev/sda` is the sd card and `7000 `is the number of MB the pi disk takes after you gparted it down to the minimum size.Next, flash the image on a new disk and make sure it works with the pi.