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?

  • Devjavu@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    10·
    3 months ago

    A single ssd with whatever formatting came with it, along with a webdav frontend I made myself. Very high security (confidentiality) actually, since I check for client side cert, user auth, biometrics (that’s plural), behavior recognition through a custom typing website and hardware token, but the integrity could use some help. And I’m painfully aware that someone could just steal my session.

    I love security.
    You’ll never get my duck nudes.

    In reality I just had a fun night

  • Jason2357@lemmy.caEnglish
    71·
    3 months 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.

  • skilltheamps@feddit.orgEnglish
    6·
    3 months ago

    You need to ask yourself what properties you want in your storage, then you can judge which solution fits. For me it is:

    • effortless rollback (i.e. in case something with a db updates, does a db migration and fails)
    • effortless backups, that preserve database integrity without slow/cumbersome/downtime-inducing crutches like sql dump
    • a scheme that works the same way for every service I host, no tailored solutions for individual services/containers
    • low maintenance

    The amount of data I’m handling fits on larger harddrives (so I don’t need pools), but I don’t want to waste storage space. And my homeserver is not my learn and break stuff environment anymore, but rather just needs to work.

    I went with btrfs raid 1, every service is in its own subvolume. The containers are precisely referenced by their digest-hashes, which gets snapshotted together with all persistent data. So every snapshot holds exactly the amount of data that is required to do a seamless rollback. Snapper maintains a timeline of snapshots for every service. Updating is semi-automated where it does snapshot -> update digest hash from container tags -> pull new images -> restart service. Nightly offsite backups happen with btrbk, which mirrors snapshots in an incremental fashion on another offsite server with btrfs.

    • melfie@lemy.lolEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      Ha, I went down the whole Ceph and Longhorn path as well, then ended up with hostPath and btrfs. Glad I’m not the only one who considers the former options too much of a headache after fully evaluating them.

  • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
    4·
    3 months ago

    Backups… with LVM, if you’re trying to do a full system backup (ie with clonezilla, etc) then you have to backup the whole thing - you can’t backup just 1 drive.

    I have a media server with 2x 2TB HDDs and 1x SSD in a LVM, split into Music, Video, TV… and the OS … and I can backup the individual files of course, but I can’t backup just the OS drive.

    btrfs didn’t exist when I created it, but I use it on my NAS and it’s great.

    I’ll be rebuilding my media server one day and change LVM to btrfs.

  • spacemanspiffy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    3 months ago

    I have a few Ext4 drives connected and I mount them in /etc/fstab and that’s it.

    I’ve yet to find a reason to change it.

  • azureskypirate@lemmy.zipEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    I’ve got Proxmox running on a nvme mirror. Two HDDs are passed to Turnkey Linux mediaserver; they are mirrored with BTRFS and act as storage. I am satisfied with all (prox, turnkey, btrfs) and would recommend.

    I had one BTRFS drive fail, and replacing it with no experience took about an hour.

    I do wish there was better user documentation for WebDAVcgi, the WebDAV frontend in Turnkey linux mediaserver.

    mediaserver comes with Samba, so I use that to connect devices like phone or laptop to the server

    Turnkey’s mediaserver was my replacement for Openmediavault with Filebrowser plugin. Filebrowser creates an internal user to write files for anything uploaded via web interface, so if you mount the folder later via NFS, the permissions don’t match. Openmediavault would stall or crash a lot as a container and especially as a VM, but maybe it runs better on bare metal.