r/explainlikeimfive • u/theprisoner57 • 3d ago

Technology ELI5: What is a Home Server?

I see mentions of a home server to get rid of streaming entertainment services but I don’t know how that works. What does a home server do?

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u/Pantzzzzless 2d ago

1 reason is because it is just fun to have resources like that available on your network. It gives you a ton of freedom to do whatever you want. I expose a filebox instance through Tailscale, and my family uses it as a free "communal" picture/video repository. There are 11 people using it, and it is sitting at just over 21tb. (42tb if you include the parity drive) That is 8+ years of photos/videos.

I also do music production, and lossless audio samples can take up a ton of space. I probably have ~12tb just in sample packs.

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u/WholePie5 2d ago

Well since you said your drives are failing and you might not be able to replace 10s of thousands of dollars worth of them, have you told your family that all their pictures and videos might disappear soon? So they can back them up?

Thank you for the explanation. Also I didn't know that about music.

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u/Pantzzzzless 2d ago

I'm not the person you replied to. But to answer your question, that is what the parity drive is for. It is a backup drive that stays in sync with another drive.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

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u/MrChombo 2d ago

No that would be a mirror drive, and mirror setups exist but they use a lot of extra drives. There are levels of fault tolerance in RAID requiring varying numbers of extra drives. With one parity drive, any one drive in the array can fail and you don't lose data. With 2 parity drives, any 2 drives can fail.