Topic
Storage & Backups
The part of the stack you forget about until you really, really wish you hadn't. ZFS without the cult, Btrfs with the caveats, LVM when you still need it, plus the backup tooling that earns its keep — Restic, Borg, Kopia, restic-rest, S3 targets, off-site replication. Snapshots are not backups. Backups you haven't restored aren't backups either.
44 articles in this topic.
Featured posts
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DIY NAS Build: Compute, Drives, Power Walkthrough
Build a proper DIY NAS in 2026: case selection, CPU choice, drives, HBA card, ZFS pool layout, UPS sizing, and a real power budget that will not fail you.
14 min read -
NVMe Heatsinks That Actually Cool
NVMe drives throttle hard at 70-85C. Here is how to monitor temps, intentionally trigger throttling to confirm it, and pick a heatsink that fixes the issue.
12 min read -
SAS vs SATA in 2026: When SAS Still Wins
SAS drives are not dead — they are cheap on eBay right now. Here is exactly when used SAS3 hardware beats SATA for home lab storage builds on a budget.
11 min read -
ddrescue vs TestDisk vs PhotoRec
Drive is dying. Which tool do you reach for? ddrescue clones, TestDisk repairs partitions, PhotoRec carves files. They're a workflow, not rivals.
14 min read -
Borg vs Duplicacy: Dedup Backup Wars
Borg is open-source classic with SSH targets. Duplicacy has lock-free multi-source magic but commercial GUI. Here's which backup tool to pick.
13 min read -
rclone vs Restic: Sync vs Backup
rclone copies and syncs files to cloud storage. Restic does deduplicated encrypted snapshots. Confusing them costs you restores at 2 AM.
11 min read
All Storage & Backups articles
- DIY NAS Build: Compute, Drives, Power Walkthrough
- NVMe Heatsinks That Actually Cool
- SAS vs SATA in 2026: When SAS Still Wins
- ddrescue vs TestDisk vs PhotoRec
- Borg vs Duplicacy: Dedup Backup Wars
- rclone vs Restic: Sync vs Backup
- ZFS Encryption vs LUKS
- Syncthing vs Resilio vs Seafile
- SMART Disk Monitoring with smartmontools
- fio: Real Disk Benchmarking
- Bcachefs in 2026: Ready or Not
- Docker Volume Mounts: Essential Flags
- How to install NextCloud via Docker
- Restic vs Borg vs Kopia: Backup Tools for People Who've Lost Data Before
- Restic Repository Maintenance: Prune, Check, Forget
- the lost+found Directory in Linux
- Backblaze B2 + rclone: Tiered Backup at Real-World Costs
- Ceph for a 3-Node Home Lab: When It Actually Pays Off
- Snapper for Btrfs Snapshots on Root Filesystems
- Kopia Repository Server: Multi-Host Backups Done Right
- ZFS Send/Receive Over WireGuard for Off-Site Replication
- mergerfs + SnapRAID: The Poor Man's Unraid
- Object Storage on a Pi: SeaweedFS Cluster Walkthrough
- Bind Mounts vs NFS for Container Storage
- RAID Is Not Backup: Rebuild Math
- RAID 6 vs RAID 10: Two Dead Disks
- RAID 0, 1, and 5: Pick One
- ZFS vs Btrfs: Which Modern Filesystem Wins?
- Find out whats taking up all the hdd space
- IPFS: Peer-to-Peer File Storage for People Who've Seen Too Many 404s
- Disk Space Tools in 2026: Beyond du and df
- Self-Hoster's Disaster Recovery: When Everything Goes Wrong at Once
- You Should Be Testing Your Restores
- Tmpfs vs Ramfs: When Your Disk Is Too Slow and Your RAM Is Just Sitting There
- Why Self-Hosted Apps Lose Data After Updates
- MinIO vs SeaweedFS: Self-Hosted S3 Storage Without AWS Bills
- MinIO + Nextcloud: S3-Compatible Storage That's Actually Yours
- LVM Advanced: Snapshots, Thin Provisioning, and Not Losing Your Data
- Docker Volumes vs Bind Mounts: Where Your Data Actually Lives
- Is Your Linux Server Destroying Its SSD?
- Cleaning Up Docker Disk Space the Right Way
- zram vs Swap: What's Actually Faster for Low-RAM Servers
- LVM The Linux Sysadmin’s Guide to Flexible Storage
- Automatic Backup of Docker MySQL or MariaDB Containers