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?
This has been my journey.
I started with pure docker and hostpath on an Ubuntu server. This worked well for me for many years and is good for most people.
Later I really wanted to learn k8s so I built a 3 node cluster with NSF managed PVC for storage, this was fantastic for learning. I enjoyed this for 3 plus years. This is all on top of proxmox and zfs
About 8 months ago I decided I'm done with my k8s learning and I wanted more simplicity in my life. I created a lxc docker and slowly migrated all my workloads back to docker and hostpath, this time backed by my mirrored zfs files system.
I guess my point is what are you hoping to get out of your journey and then tailor your solution to that.
Also I do recommend using proxmox and zfs.
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^
Shit I forgot to install a firewall.
No worries, I installed it for you.
Pfew, close one.
Wait a minute.
I just use mergerfs and SnapRAID so I can scale dynamically when I can afford new drives. Granted it's all fully replaceable media files on my end, so I'm not obsessed with data integrity.
Well, this path seems to be the most appropriate for what I am for.
And more to that, both mergerfs and snapraid are available out of the box in the latest stable Debian release.
Thanks for pointing me at it!
This is what I'm doing as well. The nice thing about it is that it supports different sized drives in the same mergerfs mount and with snapraid, you just need to make sure one of your biggest drives is the parity drive. I've got 10 drives right now with 78TB usable in the mergerfs mount and two 14TB drives acting as parity. I've been able to build it up over the years and add slowly.
Happy to help!
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.
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