I personally think of a small DIY rack stuffed with commodity HDDs off Ebay with an LVM spanned across a bunch of RAID1s. I don’t want any complex architectural solutions since my homelab’s scale always equals 1. To my current understanding this has little to no obvious drawbacks. What do you think?
Hot take: For personal use, I see no value at all in “availability,” only data preservation. If a drive fails catastrophically and I lose a day waiting for a restore from backups, no one is going to fire me. No one is going to be held up in their job. It’s not enterprise.
However, redundancy doesn’t save you when a file is deleted, corrupted, ransom-wared or whatever. Your raid mirror will just copy the problem instantly. Snapshots and 3,2,1 backups are what are important to me because when personal data is lost, it’s lost forever.
I really do think a lot of hobbyists need to focus less on highly available redundancy and more on real backups. Both time and money are better spent on that.
Agreed. RAID is useless. Your drives will never fail before you’d want to replace them with larger ones anyway.
That’s true until it isn’t.
Unrecoverable hard drive failures definitely occur, even early on in the life cycle of a drive. I like having a RAID-5 array … but then again, I don’t really have any other backups (which I really should fix).
What I really need is an ISP that doesn’t have a 1.2TB data cap.