this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2025
96 points (93.6% liked)

Selfhosted

52629 readers
1185 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] skilltheamps@feddit.org 6 points 2 days 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.