[blabitty]

>back up every single configuration file.

This right here. I recently lost my home server of 10 years courtesy of the Texas power issues during the winter storm. I rebuilt and started with fresh Linux install. Having a recent backup of /etc made it so much easier than it could have been. I had more trouble with the network driver on the new mb then with all my services, customizations and data.

[skynet-9000]

Yikes, did you have it on UPS? How did a power issue kill your server? A big spike? Most filesystems like XFS should be able to fsck even after a power drop, especially with RAID. (I prefer RAID-10 for speed of rebuilds.)

[blabitty]

Surge protector but the spikes were huge. My drives we're actually fine what got killed was the PSU and it was a case integrated PSU, in a system I had been meaning to upgrade for a while anyway. So this gave me the kick in the butt to finally do it. I also went to NVMe for the root drive wow what a difference. The system that died was not out of date software wise it had been dutifully upgraded with every major Debian release so starting on a fresh install, adding packages and copying conf files from my backups, and adding my data drives really wasn't bad. Couple of days after work to do the hw build and restore. Because of shortages / cryptomining / covid I couldn't get the HW I really wanted, that was frustrating.

[skynet-9000]

Wow. Yes, it seems like everything is a lot more expensive even if you can find it.