Hello fellow Debian users, On Thu, 2024-01-18 at 12:18 +0100, hw wrote:
> Always use an UPS. Here I have a somewhat contrarian view, I hope not to offend too much: For countries with stable electricity supplies (like Austria where I live) having a small UPS might actually lead to more problems instead of less, unless you are putting a lot of effort into it. Very often have I had problems with UPSes, e.g. batteries dying, the UPS going into some self test mode and inadvertedly shutting down, etc. I've had no external power outage in the last 5 or 10 years, but a UPS often needs at least one battery replacement during that time. Unless you have some sort of professional server rack and redundant 2 phase supply, in my opinion UPS make very little sense to the home or small office user. Also modern Linux systems with journalling filesystems will survive the occasional hard shutdown. Yes, I have pulled the plug out of running Linux boxes occasionally because I was too lazy to shut it down correctly and never had one break beyond the usual fsck on boot. > Always use redundancy to store data for a running system, like some > form of RAID. It won't hurt to use RAID for backups as well, though > I don't think that's required when you use it for the data you're > backing up. Here I also doubt if this is a wise suggestion for the typical home or small office user. RAID leads to lots and lots of complexity, that is often not needed in a home setup. I'd rather have a working backup setup with many independent copies before I even start thinking about RAID. Yes, disks can fail, but data loss often is due to user error and malware. RAID helps very little with the latter two causes of data loss. And all too often have I seen people mess up their complicated RAID setups, because they pulled the wrong disk when another one broke, or because they misinterpreted complicated error messages, creating unnecessary data loss out of user error by themselves. As a home/SOHO user, I'd rather have a working backup every few hours or every day than some RAID10 wonder that makes me lose more time on reading RAID documentation, and ordering spare drives (you've got one of those spares for each array, do you?) than is actually lost by not being able to restore to the exact last minute before a hard disk died. /ralph -- no UPS at home, using RAID1 md mirroring though
