Disaster Recovery

Picture your homelab disk dying tonight. Not corrupting, not throwing SMART warnings for a week first, just gone. The GitLab that holds every repo you care about, the password vault, fifteen years of family photos, the home automation that runs your house. All of it on a drive that has decided it’s done. Can you answer what happens next without your stomach dropping? If not, you don’t have backups. You have hope, and hope is not a strategy you want to discover the limits of at 2am. ...

For a couple of years my homelab cluster ran without much drama. Nodes came and went, workloads shifted around, and the worst I ever had to deal with was the occasional pod stuck in CrashLoopBackOff. The kind of stable where you stop thinking about what happens if it all goes away. Then one evening I ran a terraform destroy against the wrong workspace. By the time I noticed, the control plane was gone. Not degraded. Gone. ...