Your Data Isn't Safe Just Because You Own the Server

There’s a post doing the rounds on r/selfhosted right now with a title that made me laugh before it made me think: something like “another reason to self-host, your data might get bombed.” Someone was pointing out that people who lost data during actual conflict zones, homes destroyed, servers gone, and using it as a talking point for why self-hosting beats the cloud. The comment section did what Reddit comment sections do best: took a genuinely serious premise and ran it straight into the ground with jokes about BombDetectarr and storing your data in your brain until it starts having defragmentation issues. Fair play. Some things are too absurd not to laugh at.

But buried under all the gallows humour was a comment that actually nailed the point, and it’s one I think about a fair bit in my own setup at home. Someone wrote that the headline was doing a lot of work, and that the real lesson has nothing to do with cloud versus self-hosted. The lesson is that a single location is a single point of failure, full stop, no matter whose name is on the server rack. Their basement is a softer target than an AWS availability zone, sure, but a burst pipe or a house fire will happily destroy ten years of family photos just as thoroughly as an actual explosion would.

I run a handful of services at home. Nothing fancy, a Raspberry Pi and an old NUC doing double duty as a Plex box and a place to dump backups from my wife’s laptop. For years I told myself this was “good enough,” because at least it wasn’t sitting on someone else’s infrastructure where I had no control over it. Then one night a power surge during a storm took out a cheap power board and very nearly took the NUC with it. Nothing was lost in the end, more through luck than planning, but it was a decent reminder that self-hosting isn’t a magic shield. It just moves the risk from “a company’s data centre in Sydney” to “my garage, which floods slightly whenever it rains sideways.”

The instinct to self-host is a good one and I don’t want to talk anyone out of it. There’s something genuinely satisfying about knowing exactly where your data lives, what’s touching it, and who has access. It’s the same instinct that makes me prefer cooking a meal from scratch over ordering it, even though the result is sometimes worse and definitely takes longer. Control has its own value even when it’s not strictly more efficient.

But control over location isn’t the same thing as resilience, and that’s where a lot of home-lab enthusiasm quietly runs out of steam. It’s easy to spend a weekend setting up Docker containers and reverse proxies and feel very accomplished, and much less fun to spend that same energy setting up an actual offsite backup that you test regularly. I’ll admit I was guilty of this for longer than I’d like to say. I had backups. I did not, for a long time, have backups I’d actually tried restoring from. There’s a particular flavour of denial that comes from assuming a backup exists just because a cron job ran without an error.

The broader point, which someone in that thread made without any of the sarcasm, is that the actual enemy is single points of failure, not clouds or basements specifically. Big companies get this wrong too. We’ve all read the outage post-mortems where “multiple availability zones” turned out to be a few kilometres apart, which is great for redundancy against a server catching fire and useless against anything bigger. Geographic diversity matters more than which company’s logo is on the building.

None of this is really about bombs, obviously, unless you happen to live somewhere that risk is real, in which case data loss is rightly the least of your worries. For the rest of us it’s about the much more boring, much more likely stuff: a house fire, a stolen laptop, a hard drive that finally gives up after eight quiet years of spinning. The 3-2-1 backup rule gets repeated in these threads so often it’s basically background noise, and there’s a reason for that. Three copies, two different media, one offsite. It’s not exciting advice. It won’t make anyone feel clever at a dinner party. But it’s the difference between a bad week and a genuinely bad year.

I’ve since set up a proper offsite backup through a mate in Ballarat, our servers essentially babysitting each other’s data, and there’s something quietly satisfying about it that has nothing to do with the tech itself. It’s the same feeling as knowing your smoke alarms have fresh batteries. You hope you never need it. You sleep slightly better knowing it’s there.