Data

Back in the old days, you’ve have one really big server, EMC appliance or similar. You’d access it over the network and things were fine. There were expensive hardware solutions if you needed more uptime. You went vertical.

This is still the way for most home users. A turn-key NAS, TrueNAS or OMV solution is pretty decent. It’s centralized and reliable. The best of these use ZFS and you can get good results on commodity hardware.

But if you want to reboot the hardware without causing an outage, you’ll have to have more than one box. For file storage, that means a distributed system like Ceph, Gluster, DRBD or one of the many other entrants.

If you want to be cutting edge, ditch the filesystem altogether for object storage like RustFS rsync or minio. Though you’ll need to pair that with rclone or juicefs for programs that don’t’ talk S3 web object language (which is most things).