Hello preppers! As I prepare further and further for the digital and traditional collapse of society (/s), I finally got to the point of building my selfhosted server.

At the moment I have a single bay Synology nas but it will soon find a new home (🗑️). I was thinking that instead of buying new tech I can be a conscious human being and recycle my old laptop.

My old MSI PE60 2QD with i7 5th Gen, its a very capable machine and having the battery, I think, is better for a sudden loss of power. I replaced it because the hinge and screen broke but I never thrown it away.

I wanted to wipe it and install some linux distro for selfhosting with, I think, Tailscale for access it remotely. I use it to store file, photos, music …normal cloud stuff.

Before wasting hours troubleshooting, I’m sure there are brilliant people here that can give me tips or a link to a simple guide to follow. (Please don’t make me ask the bots).

I’m sure this thread is already open somewhere and I’ll be happy to follow that and delete this, if so.

Thank you lemmings.

  • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    5·
    1 day ago

    RAID isn’t backup, or even redundancy, it’s for creating large storage pools. It’s at the mercy of the controller and all the hardware. In fact, the more disks you have, the more likely you are to be impacted by a failure.

    In a typical RAID 5, if one drive fails, the entire array is at risk until the drive can be replaced, and resilvered. During resilvering (rebuilding the drive with all the data it should have, parity, etc), the entire array is at even more risk because of the load on the other disks.

    With dual parity and hot spare (less data storage total), you get a little more security since the parity is doubled and the hot spare will be automatically resilvered if a drive fails, but that’s not without similar risks during that process.

    You still need backup.

    Here’s a real-world example of RAID risks. I have a 5-drive NAS with 5 1TB drives, which gives me roughly 4TB of usable space (1TB parity). It runs software RAID using ZFS (a highly resilient file system, that can build arrays using varying disk sizes, and has some self-healing capability). I’ve had a drive go bad, replacing took 30 hours to rebuild. During that time, the entire array is “degraded”, meaning no parity protecting the data because it’s currently rebuilding the parity. If another drive were to have failed during this read/write intensive period, I would have lost ALL the data.

    To protect against this, I have 2 other large drives which this data is replicated to. And then I use a cloud storage for backup (storj.io).

    This is a modified version of the 3-2-1 method that works for my risk assessment.

    Without offsite backup, you’re always at risk of local issues - fire, flood, etc. Or even just a massive power spike (though that’s not much of a risk, especially if you use a UPS).

    I’m actually building a second NAS to have easier local redundancy, and because I have a bunch of drives sitting around. With TrueNAS or Unraid, it’s pretty easy to repurpose old hardware. Though power is always a concern, so I’m looking for an inexpensive motherboard that has low power draw at idle.