You don’t need to pop it out to DD the SD card, you can do it while it’s running. I like to pipe DD through gzip to get a compressed image as the output so I’m not sitting on 16gb file for 3gb worth of files.

I hate to admit that I love using these micro business computers, but they’re pretty awesome. Stackable, powerful, upgradeable, cheap second hand or refurbished. I’ve considered nucs, but you can find buckets of these for cheaper.