What actually counts as a copy under the 3-2-1 rule, why a RAID mirror or a snapshot only protects against one kind of failure, and the one-page inventory that exposes the gaps.
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Disclosure: this is my own article (Charles Hartmann, Homelab the Right Way). Written with AI help and edited by me; the setup described is mine.
Marketplace is your friend. 7th gen intel computers can be found for cheap because Windows doesn’t support them anymore. Wipe the boot disk, install OMV and done. Now the hard part is of course hard disks. Still scour the used market but at least OMV will let you mismatch disk sizes with SnapRAID+MergerFS as long as you aren’t using ZFS and the parity drive is the same or bigger than the largest data drive.
For most people you don’t need to go extremely huge.
Then just set a nightly rsync.
I dont engage with corporate social media.
And craigslist is busted.
You can often find storage in old computers at 2nd hand shops for cheap, and backups don’t usually need to be fast, so performance isn’t super critical.
Kijiji is pretty good too but it might only be in Canada?