The Death and Rebirth of My Home Server After a Power Outage
The death and rebirth of my home server
After a sudden power outage killed my Raspberry Pi's microSD card, I rebuilt my home server with a focus on longevity. I implemented zram to minimize writes, repurposed old hard drives into a redundant btrfs pool, and set up robust backups using NixOS and restic to ensure my data survives future hardware failures.
"If you live in the current year of 2026 you probably know this is not a good time to be buying any new drives (or RAM, or GPUs, or anything that can be used to build datacenters and feed the pockets of executives enraptured by AI psychosis) and that it's a better idea to get scrappy and creative with what you have."
HN discussion
- Many users argue that Raspberry Pi SD card corruption stems from default software configurations like swap and atime, or cheap consumer-grade cards, rather than inherent hardware flaws.
- Practitioners strongly recommend booting Raspberry Pis from USB SSDs or NVMe drives instead of SD cards to avoid corruption and improve performance.
- While SMART data is useful for monitoring drive health, several commenters note it rarely predicts sudden catastrophic failures, making redundant storage and backups essential.
- A significant debate exists regarding swap management, with experts advocating for zram or zswap to prevent disk writes while others warn against using RAM for swap when physical disks are available.
- Some users highlight that modern enterprise SSDs or x86 mini-PCs offer superior reliability and value for home servers compared to the traditional Raspberry Pi setup.