Tiny home server project?

[Cláudio Vieira]

Hello DragonFlyers,

I'm a newcomer to DragonFly and thinking of a nice project to experiment.
Maybe an extra small server to run a couple services, kind of an appliance,
for home and family use, like a backups server or a media library...

What could be the minimal / recommended hardware requirements?

There’s not much info on the web about tiny servers using DragonFly.
Perhaps I’m on the wrong path here or was just unlucky not to find it.
Shared stories and pointers to similar projects would be appreciated.

I know the one true answer is “it depends”! :)

Let’s take an example, say a tiny home backups server with 1TB storage.
Starting with a single board computer (SBC of type x86_64 of course),
how much RAM would be needed or recommended?

Some SBCs have internal storage (e.g. eMMC) that could be used to
install DragonFly, but they risk wear out. Alternatively, maybe DragonFly
could be loaded (even from a USB stick) and run entirely from RAM?

It seems the HAMMER file system would be a perfect match for this use
case. Would you recommend 1 or 2, since some features are divergent?

Concerning data storage redundancy, for sure it would be easy to attach
a couple drives (HDDs or SSDs) and set them in “mirror” mode or similar. 

What about backup of the backups (e.g. offline or offsite)?! It seems
HAMMER would be helpful for this too, but I’m not sure how…

Would it be possible to connect a secondary HAMMER drive (USB)
on demand and sync it automatically with the main drive?

Thanks,
Cláudio Vieira