[horsawlarway]

Sure - none of that changes that longhorn.io is great.

I run both an external NAS as an NFS service and longhorn. I'd probably just use longhorn at this point, if I were doing it over again. My nodes have plenty of sata capacity, and any new storage is going into them for longhorn at this point.

I back up to an external provider (backblaze/wasabi/s3/etc). I'm usually paying less than a dollar a month for backups, but I'm also fairly judicious in what I back up.

Yes - it's a little weird to spin up a container to read the disk of a longhorn volume at first, but most times you can just use the longhorn dashboard to manage volume snapshots and backup scheduling as needed. Ex - if you're not actually trying to pull content off the disk, you don't ever need to do it.

If you are trying to pull content off the volume, I keep a tiny ssh/scp container & deployment hanging around, and I just add the target volume real fast, spin it up, read the content I need (or more often scp it to my desktop/laptop) and then remove it.