Backups only used blocks. Backup to or from various locations, NFS shares, ftp, WebDAV, ssh server, samba, etc. Encryption of the images, backup of single partitions or whole disks.

If you want to deploy to several machines at once it also has a load of tools for that too.

You 100% want to use Clonezilla for this job. It should be on everyone’s Ventoy stick.

Who has more chance of a single disk failing today: me with 6 disks, or Backblaze with their 300,000 drives?

Same thing works with 6 vs 2.

Seagate “raw read error rate” is a terrifyingly big number if everything is hunky dory.

They’re in a drafty garage. This time of year I keep them spinning to stop them freezing 🤣

Yeah flat out spinning is definitely better for reliability.

The reason I went RAIDZ2 in my current setup was because of the number of disks increasing the chance of multi failures. But with fewer disks that goes down. I’m not at all worried about data loss, as I said I have good backups so I can always restore. So if the remaining disk dies during a rebuild, that’s unfortunate, but it only affects my uptime, not my data.

So a year ago you spent over 3k on disks?

That’s the exact opposite of my experience, if we’re talking anecdotal evidence. I’ve had 3x WD Red drives die within the warranty period,so thankfully I wasn’t out of pocket, but I now avoid them. Never had a Seagate go bad, but my goto is now Toshiba.

I moved from a Drll R710 with dual docket Xeons to a rack mount desktop case with a single Ryzen R5 5600G. I doubled the performance and halved the power consumption in one go. I do miss having idrac though. I need a KVM over IP solution but haven’t stomached the cost yet. For how often I need it it’s not an issue.

I have some scripts that use restic to backup to locally connected USB drives weekly.

The USB drives are connected to smart plugs that I control via home assistant and some webhooks. So the drives are off and stay off when not in use for the backup. I also don’t turn them both on at the same time.

I bought an Odroid HC2 years ago with the intent to have it connect over wireguard and mount to the NAS VM. Then I could put it in a friends house and use it as an offsite backup.

I also sometimes backup to backblaze

Man suggests the next 25 years may have some surprises - world goes nuts.

I have Unbound and a pihole. Started with just unbound but found I needed device specific rules that I couldn’t do. So I setup pihole and some devices use that as published through the DHCP. Things like the Mrs didn’t want certain ad blocking on her devices, but I did everything else. Also means in future I can block more just on the kids devices.

Ha, DNS is the only one of those that I have sorted. I have some reading to do.

In 2025 RAID does not work. It will not protect you from errors. it’s all a mirage. The only sane option these days is ZFS.

Centralised identity management, particularly for machine logon, NFS and maybe a few of the services I run.

Just get a cheap old office PC from eBay or local market place for £50. Add your disks using ZFS (don’t use raid as it basically doesn’t work in modern systems). I’d be tempted to get one 4tb internal drive and one external usb to use as your backup drive.

I picked that up too and the first 5 minutes I was not prepared for.

I was meaning their switches. I didn’t know they did routers / firewalls. Interesting that they’re not as advanced as their other offerings which are really good. My opnsense setup has taken years to hone and I have no desire to start over with that.

I have 2x Tplink EAP 610 access points. Linking back to an Opnsense virtualized router. The APs are great and Omada is fantastic - I’m running it in a docker container with no cloud access required.

I would go all Omada if I could but that would mean I’d need 3 POE Omada switches and I cant justify that cost at the moment.