Homelab / Architecture
Storage & Backup
Ceph for guest disks, separated file tiers, backup instead of RAID everywhere — plus an offsite target for site resilience.
Compute disks and file data are different problems. Resilience comes from backup and measurable recovery — not from mirroring every drive.
Four roles
Hover or focus a node for details.
VM and container disks on the cluster — separate from file shares.
Documents, pictures, and structured media — the everyday hot path.
Large, swappable volumes — media, ISOs, archive, Time Machine.
Proxmox Backup Server backs up guest disks — not the file datasets in the NAS.
Selective second backup target at another site — not a full mirror.
Regular file copies of important shares onto a 1-bay NAS on the LAN.
| Role | For | Deliberately not |
|---|---|---|
| Ceph on hypervisor SSDs | VM and container disks | File shares and archives |
| ZFS hot (TrueNAS) | Documents, pictures, structured media shares | USB bulk and offsite substitute |
| USB warm/cold (OMV) | Large, swappable volumes — media, ISOs, archive, Time Machine | The only home for personal hot data |
| Second medium (Synology, 1-bay) | File copies of important shares and cold data on the LAN | Primary NAS, guest backup server, offsite |
Physical disks and raw capacity: Storage & Disks. Appliance: Synology DS118.
Why virtual?
TrueNAS and OMV deliberately run as guests on the hypervisor — not as separate bare-metal NAS boxes.
- One platform: storage roles live in the same compute fleet as everything else (infrastructure as code, backup of the appliance guests) — instead of second physical appliance silos.
- Role split: hot ZFS stays lean and fast; large USB volumes stay swappable and attach only to the warm/cold guest (passthrough), not to the hot pool.
- Physical only where required: USB bulk needs hypervisor passthrough; the hot path does not.
Synology remains the exception: a physical second medium on the LAN for file copies — deliberately simple, not the primary NAS.
Backup: guests, files, offsite
Three separate paths — mixing them is the failure mode:
- Guests (VM/LXC) → Proxmox Backup Server as the primary target. That backs up the guest disk, not the file datasets inside the NAS.
- File shares → snapshots on the hot pool plus a regular copy to a second medium on the LAN (Synology). You still have a copy if the primary NAS is gone.
- Offsite → a second backup target at another site, selective by importance and capacity — not a full mirror of everything.
In short: a 3-2-1 target — production, a local backup medium, and a copy outside the site. Service tiles: Services (PBS, PBS Offsite, TrueNAS, OMV, Synology).
Why not RAID everywhere
RAID protects against drive failure inside a running array. It does not protect against deletion, ransomware, or losing the site — and it doubles capacity cost.
So in this lab:
- Backup and time-to-recovery beat “mirror everything”.
- Hot paths (ZFS, Ceph replica) carry sensible redundancy; cold/archive and 1-bay volumes may stay simple as long as a second copy exists.
- Restore targets are pragmatic (hours to days), not an enterprise SLA — validated by restore tests, not marketing RAID levels.
Budget goes to capacity + a second medium + offsite, not to doubling primary storage on every USB disk.
Performance — qualitative
On a fast client link, roughly:
- ZFS hot — fast enough for daily documents and pictures.
- USB HDD warm — typical HDD sequential rates; SMB can serve from server RAM after a fresh write and fake disk speed.
- Backup/cold NAS — deliberately HDD and slower; archive and second copy, not a hot path.
Concrete MB/s and hostnames stay out of the portfolio — only the pattern matters.
What this page deliberately omits
No internal hostnames, IPs, VLAN/VMID plans, backup target paths, or “here’s how you mount it” guides. The portfolio shows the design — operations stay private.
Layer context: Architecture. Site connectivity: Connectivity.