Comment

Comment on Every single time I think of restructuring my homelab storage. What do you use for storage engines and how does it benefit you?

Jason2357@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

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.

source

Sort:hotnew top

SomethingBurger@jlai.lu ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Agreed. RAID is useless. Your drives will never fail before you’d want to replace them with larger ones anyway.

source
- SparroHawc@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  That’s true until it isn’t.
  
  Unrecoverable hard drive failures definitely occur, and it can be catastrophic when it does if you don’t have any backups. One of my backups just happens to be the two other hard drives in the RAID-5 array.
  
  source
  - chirping@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    no what you really need is backups, isn’t it? having an external hdd that you’re backing up to is a lot better against data loss than putting that same drive into any kind of raid. (because now you truly have a copy, while in a raid it’s still a single point of failure)
    
    I can feel your pain on the ISP part though. (Haven’t looked into this, but sounds like a zfs-job) Just saying that backups doesn’t have to be offsite, but they do need to be separate from the original data medium. Going offsite is an important early step, but getting it on separate storage is the first step.
    
    If anything, I would argue that especially in a homelab, the risk of misconfigurations or by mistakes when tinkering can increase by using raid. If you’ve have a couple of years of experience with raid and do not see my above argument, then please share your experiences.
    
    I am sorry for this wall of text, your comment caught my eye while thinking about something else, tl;dr: raid is not a backup
    
    source
    SparroHawc@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    You’re absolutely right on all counts.
    
    That said, my RAID setup is on a Synology, so it’s brain-dead simple and not especially prone to falling over.
    
    source