Comment by toprerules
1 day ago
Your house a single failure domain, you're not really going to be resilient to a lot of common failures, and most of these home labs have every device plugged into the same UPS, so there's really no difference between the power failure domain of 10 Pis and one desktop computer plugged into a UPS connected to your home router.
Do yourself a favor and buy a NAS and a compatible UPS. Any modern NAS software will speak one of the UPS IP protocols to handle graceful shutdown if your power goes off. Once you have the money, buy a second NAS and put it in a relatives house, set up a wireguard/tailscale tunnel between the two devices, and use it for offsite backups.
It's not power failure I'm worried about, it's failure of other systems. But even so, yes, it's more likely that the systems that are supposed to ensure redundancy will fail than the otherwise-non-redundant services.
For what it's worth, my house isn't a single power domain -- I'm running some of my services on an old laptop that's still got some battery. But it goes to sleep if the power goes off, and needs physical intervention to recover. Which is an excellent example of redundant systems providing multiple single points of failure and of the perils of using random left-over hardware to run stuff.
Separating storage, compute, and database into dedicated appliances makes sense for home labs. Getting redundant units early is key.
A pre-built NAS (configured to raid 5 at least) is worth the cost - storage should be set-and-forget since drives will fail and hot-swapping drives and automatic rebuilds should be zero downtime to life. Commercial NAS solutions have proven backup workflows.
For compute and databases, home setups can mirror to cloud or remote locations. Proxmox makes this straightforward with its web admin - just a few clicks to spin up replicas.
Modern consumer hardware and internet are quite reliable now. Business-grade equipment performs even better.