I believe this is a slightly controversial topic, at least from what I have gathered so far. Some say its best to leave the server on to spare the life time of the spinning rust. Other seem to prefer to save power and boot the server off each night. So wanted to chip in and hear what folks here do and why do what you do.

Bonus question; Do you guys have a UPS? Is it a must have for a homelab, or does it just depend on the usecase?

  • @MeanEYEEnglish
    2•24 days ago

    I have a small 6U rack in my hallway which is where all the server stuff sits. There are 1U UPS units, but I haven’t had the need for it yet. However after replacing motherboard on this current machine I forgot to turn on option for auto start after power failure. My servers are mostly for collecting data regarding temperature, humidity and other metrics around the house, glass house and other parts. Same machine also collects surveillance data from cameras around the property which detect human and animal shapes.

    So since machine rarely does long term calculations or data processing it’s okay that it doesn’t have UPS, since no data would be coming anyway without power.