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.
56 articles in this topic.
Featured posts
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Btrfs RAID 5/6: Still Don't
The kernel docs still warn about it. The Btrfs wiki still warns about it. People still build it and lose data. Here's the write hole, why RAID 1/10 are fine, and what to use instead.
6 min read -
SnapRAID: Parity Without Real-Time RAID
Your media library doesn't write often enough to justify mdadm or ZFS overhead. SnapRAID calculates parity on a schedule, mixes drive sizes, and pairs with MergerFS for a unified pool. Here's the setup.
9 min read -
mdadm Day-2: Grow, Replace, Scrub
Creating a RAID array is the easy part. The drama starts six months later when one drive starts dying. Here's the survival guide for everything that happens after mdadm --create.
11 min read -
Hardware RAID vs Software RAID in 2026
Hardware RAID controllers used to be necessary. Now they're often a liability. Here's when to flash that LSI card to IT mode, when to keep it, and why ZFS specifically refuses to share.
13 min read -
RAID-Z and dRAID: ZFS Parity Explained
RAID-Z isn't just RAID 5 with a new name. Variable stripe widths, no write hole, and dRAID's distributed spares change the rebuild math entirely.
13 min read -
RAID 50/60: Nested Parity Done Right
RAID 5 and 6 don't scale gracefully past 8 drives. RAID 50 and RAID 60 stripe across multiple parity sub-arrays so rebuilds only stress one group. Here's when nesting actually pays off.
13 min read
All Storage & Backups articles
- Btrfs RAID 5/6: Still Don't
- SnapRAID: Parity Without Real-Time RAID
- mdadm Day-2: Grow, Replace, Scrub
- Hardware RAID vs Software RAID in 2026
- RAID-Z and dRAID: ZFS Parity Explained
- RAID 50/60: Nested Parity Done Right
- Borgmatic: Borg Backup, Done Right
- PostgreSQL on ZFS: Tuning, Snapshots, Pitfalls
- TrueNAS vs OpenMediaVault vs Unraid
- Longhorn vs Rook-Ceph
- Velero: K8s Backup and DR
- 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
- ZFS Replication with syncoid + sanoid: The Lazy Admin's Backup
- 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