I try keep my data drives and boot drives separate on my servers, I make sure I can rebuild the server relatively easily so no matter what happens I can get back up and running. In my research on LVMs I wasn’t seeing anything saying you could just move the drives to a new setup, that you had to export and import first. In the case of a suddenly dead boot drive, I wouldn’t be able to do that. I did see some steps for backing up an LVMs metadata and recovering from that, so I might be sure I do that at some point, but another user said that modern distros should be able to scan for LVMs without issue, which is not what I found in my quick test in my setup. So I’ll be checking that out in a more modern setup to double check.

From what I was reading, recovering from corrupted metadata is not something I want to do. I’d rather not use LVM if that’s what’s required if I can’t just move the drives to a new server, as nice as it would be to resize filesystems on a whim.

I did not find just moving the drives to work. There were some other issues that I came across that might have a part to play in it, I made the lvm and filesystem on an RPI5 running OMV and moved it to a rock3c running OMV from an armbian install. Turns out there’s a pagefile size mismatch between the two that prevented mounting the btrfs filesystem. But I still wasn’t able to get the rock3c to recognize the VG or that there were new PVs attached without exporting first. So perhaps the armbian install isn’t modern enough to automatically recognize it.

I didn’t expect learning new things about btrfs to be the outcome of this little experiment, but I guess that’s just how things work.

That’s kind of what I figured, my biggest concern at this point would be how difficult it is to move the lvm volume to a different device. It seems pretty straightforward if you have a working setup, but from what I’m seeing in my research is silence if your device (server, etc.) dies and you need to move those volumes to another. I’m finding guides on either recovering from corruption or lost metadata, or transferring from one working device to another. Nothing I can find about importing a fully functional lvm to a new device if it hasn’t been exported.

I’ll be able to do that later today, so I guess I’ll see what happens if I do. Better to try it out now when it isn’t critical.

I had my partner put in the addresses of my *arr stack into their phone and showed them how to add things they wanted. They never close any tabs so all I need to say is what weird-ass unrelated name handles whatever media they want and I’m done.

I’ve been interested in setting up a monitoring setup like this, mostly out of curiosity about what’s going on when I’m not looking. But I know what the answer is and it’s not as exciting as I’d like it to be.

Mine is raspberry pi zero 2w with an external enclosure attached to solar+battery. Wi-Fi is barely consistent enough for speeds around 1/4 what they should be. I’m still working out the kinks, but thanks be to FSM for rsync and snapshots, otherwise my backup scheme would probably never be able to finish.

Agreed, I just spent a week (very intermittently) trying to figure out where all my free space had gone, turns out it was a bunch of abandoned docker volumes taking up. I have 32gb on my laptop, so space is at an absolute premium.

I guess I learned my lesson about trying out docker containers on my laptop just to check them out.

I’m doing a 5-4-3-2-1 method. 5 backups. 4 on-site. 3 attached to one machine, 2 of those are on separate external usb drives synced at different intervals. 1 in the shed.

I do similar, except nextcloud and backups beyond just syncing. I fear something corrupting my database and that syncing immediately through all my devices.

EDIT: Wow! thanks for all the detailed and super quick replies! I’ve been reading all the comments here and am concluding that (even though I am currently running only one service) it might be interesting to start using Docker to run all (future) services seperately on the server!

This is pretty much what I’ve started doing. Containers have the wonderful benefit that if you don’t like it, you just delete it. If you install on bare metal (at least in Linux) you can end up with a lot of extra packages getting installed and configured that could affect your system in the future. With containers, all those specific extras are bundled together and removed at the same time without having any effect on your base system, so you’re always at your clean OS install.

I will also add an irritation with docker containers as well, if you create something in a container that isn’t kept in a shared volume, it gets destroyed when starting the container again. The container you use keeps the maintainers setup, for instance I do occasional encoding of videos in a handbrake container, I can’t save any profiles I make within that container because it will get wiped next time I restart the container since it’s part of the container, not on any shared volume.

Did you do the nextcloudpi install?

If you don’t need a laptop, I’ve been having a blast with using mini/micro/tiny business PCs off of eBay. I’ve had zero issues installing Debian on them, and they’re designed to be easy to maintain by IT departments, so Wi-Fi, storage, RAM, and even CPUs are all replaceable. They are mobile CPUs, so if you need the heavy lifting of desktop CPUs, you’d probably need to go with a larger form factor.

Check eBay for used business micro/mini/tiny PCs. They’re pretty cheap, and low power consumption. They’re mostly Intel processors, so that’s what you make of it. If I were you I’d look for i3 processors 9th gen and up, i5 and i7 8th Gen and up for transcoding. They can hardware transcode pretty much anything but AV1, vp9, and hevc 12bit but the processors are powerful enough that they can transcode those to x265/264 to a device or two using the CPU without issues.

If you don’t plan on transcoding, I’ve had no issues with a 5th Gen i5 NUC doing server things, but I do offload any processor heavy things to my 7060 micro (8th Gen i7) machine if I want it done quickly.

As mentioned many times I’m sure, I use my rpi’s as a pi-hole/VPN. It’s nice having them as dedicated devices for low power things, if my main server ever fudges up, my VPN still works and internal DNS is still resolved. If I’m not home and get complaints from the family that jellyfin isn’t working, I can either fix it remotely or wake up my dev server for them to use in the meantime.

I also have an rpi 1 as a “dedicated ssh machine” that I can ssh into in case all of my other machines have gone goofy. If for any reason my two main devices aren’t accessible, that one will be because if there’s power to the house it will turn on. It does literally nothing else, so there’s very little chance a power outage will corrupt anything. It does require that the pivpn device is working if I’m not home, but I prefer to leave that to it’s own …devices.

This one gave me the confidence to post my setup, I salute your bravery (°_°)7.

The best of luck with your future insurance claim.

Uggo = uptime

• Old Synology NAS for storage
• Optiplex 7060 running jellyfin, paperless, *arr stack, handbrake, ripper, maybe some other containers.
• NUC5 running nextcloud (nextcloudpi) baremetal and an audiobiokshelf container

I would think that the power led would be on if there’s power going through the motherboard.

Are you referring to the power led or the disk usage led? I think on my nuc the only other led is the disk usage one, which looks like a soda can. The power led is always on, but doesn’t indicate standby or operating as far as I’ve seen.

It’s likely there’s another boot device that’s taking priority over USB, if USB is even enabled in the bios. I’ve had a few computers that try to pxe boot after internal drives, so it never went to usb until I futzed with the boot order to remove pxe. It’s likely not that you didn’t have an SSD in it, but that USB drives aren’t high enough on the boot list, or not at all. You could try finding what the boot selection key press is on boot, then blindly picking first, second, third option etc. to see if anything gets a hit (frantically press boot key during start up then hit enter after a few seconds, then reset and do it again if nothing happens after about 30 seconds, but hit down, then enter.)

I don’t keep a Swiss army knife set of distros anymore. I put tumbleweed on a USB. It’s rolling so I update it when I plug it in, then do what I need to do.

I used to have a USB with Ubuntu LTS and whatever the newest Ubuntu was. Then another would get something else that I needed/wanted. I always ended up wiping the drive and adding the newest release every single time. I was always out of date by the time I needed one of them for boot repair or something. This was also a time when persistence… Wasn’t very persistent. With tumbleweed I can install whatever I need and it’s there next time. I’m sure you can do the same with any other rolling release, but tumbleweed is in my opinion on par stability-wise with incremental distros. It’s my first grab whenever I need to check a PC. If I need another distro or boot USB, I can make it from this one with a second USB. I suppose the only thing I can’t do is make a bootable USB if the computer I’m on can’t access the Internet