Editing Storage (section)

== Mixing your Homelab and Personal Data Silos ==
Unless you are on a very tight budget, one best practice would be to avoid storing any critical personal data on your homelab storage, or at the very minimum setup some form of logical separation, with different permissions. This will prevent many potential issues such as a test script accidentally deleting your data, a security vulnerability being exploited in you test lab allowing someone to gain access to your personal data, etc. Similarly it is a very sensible idea to backup your personal data and keep a copy on a secure system which would not be impacted in the event of an outage or compromise of your homelab storage.

One (reasonably extreme) example of this comes from Alex Galbraith of the homelab project, who has 4x Synology devices:
* Primary Site (Home!)
** Primary VM storage (Synology DS412+ with 4x 240GB Sandisk SSDs)
** Primary Personal storage (Synology DS412+ with 4x 2TB WD Red Drives)
** Backup storage (Synology DS413j with 4x 3TB WD Red Drives) - Completely different set of accounts and passwords to the primary storage devices
* Remote Site (Family Members home)
** Remote Backup storage (Synology DS215j+ with 2x 3TB WD Red Drives) replicating key volumes from the DS413j

=== Principles and Best Practices ===
Now this example is perhaps a bit OTT, but the principles can be applied on almost any budget:
* Segregation of VM and personal storage
* Backup key data and VMs
* Replicate or copy your backups elsewhere in case of fire/theft/lightning strike, etc