The Death and Rebirth of My Home Server After a Power Outage
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.
- inigyou
Raspberry Pis are notorious for SD card corruption with unknown causes. In this era you might replace it with a mini-PC (NUC style).
- arjie
Classic power failure and raspberry pi with SD cards. When I last set up things for my parents, I simply imaged a bunch of SD cards and had the data stored on an external hard drive. I live in the US and they live in India and this is for their RaspBMC. With the SD cards they just swap a broken one with a new one and call it a day.
Been 12 years or so now. Went back to their home a few years ago and everything but the opensubtitles integration works. I was surprised. I could never recreate it now. Even has one of these flirc setups so the remote works.
India has unreliable power too so the SD card death was inevitable. I made a few more images and called it a day.
- Venn1
My Raspberry Pi 4 has been used to run both a Jitsi and Trackmania server over the years. I never considered using the SD card since it can boot and run from a USB 3 flash drive. Later on, I picked up an Argon One case to add a SATA SSD.
Thankfully, modern Rockchip SBCs tend to come with NVMe slots.
- ungreased0675
I use a Waveshare hat for my Pi 5s. It does PoE and has a spot for an SSD. What I particularly like about this setup is the single wire running to each board, looks very clean.
- larrydag
I'm not a sysadmin but I often hear about server failures due to hardware just wearing out. Is there an expected shelf life of the hardware? I would expect for sure on the storage devices. So if that were the case then why isn't there some sore of daemon or system software service that tracks the expected life of the hardware? I would expect that the software would start showing warnings of imminent useful life of devices to expire.
- onel
That was a good read.
But this is the kind of experience that makes technical people fall in love with self-hosting, but also keeps the majority of the population away.
Most of the people don't want the hassle of managing a self-hosting box.
I think a middle ground option might where someone hosts it for you, but you can also move to your own hardware at any time might be best
- ozim
What a great example of nice writing. I just liked reading it.
- ranger207
If you're using a USB adapter on a Pi 4 you can use raspi-config to enable booting from an external drive and not worry about SD cards at all