Disaster Recovery

Your homelab runs your GitLab, your passwords, your photos, your home automation. What happens when the disk fails? If you can’t answer that question confidently, you don’t have backups. You have hope. The 3-2-1 rule has been around for decades because it works. Three copies, two different media, one offsite. Here’s how to actually implement it. The 3-2-1 Rule Explained flowchart TD subgraph rule["3-2-1 Backup Rule"] Data["Original Data"] subgraph three["3 Copies"] C1["Copy 1<br/>(Original)"] C2["Copy 2<br/>(Local Backup)"] C3["Copy 3<br/>(Offsite)"] end subgraph two["2 Media Types"] M1["NVMe/SSD"] M2["HDD/NAS"] end subgraph one["1 Offsite"] Off["Cloud/Remote"] end end Data --> C1 Data --> C2 Data --> C3 C1 --> M1 C2 --> M2 C3 --> Off Why Three Copies? Copy 1: Your live data (original) Copy 2: Local backup (fast restore) Copy 3: Offsite backup (disaster recovery) One copy is not a backup. Two copies can both fail in the same disaster (fire, flood, ransomware). Three copies with separation gives you real resilience. ...

Your cluster is gone. Complete failure. The cloud region is down, the hardware died, or someone ran the wrong terraform destroy. Everything is gone. Now what? If you’ve been doing GitOps right, the answer is: spin up a new cluster, point ArgoCD at Git, wait. Your entire infrastructure recreates itself. This is the ultimate promise of GitOps: Git is your backup. Why GitOps Changes Disaster Recovery Traditional DR involves: Regular backups of cluster state Backup storage (etcd snapshots, Velero backups) Tested restore procedures Recovery time measured in hours GitOps DR is different: ...