I keep seeing the 3-2-1 rule recommended for home servers, and it makes perfect sense for family photos, documents and anything else that genuinely can’t be recreated.

It gets less obvious with ripped media, old installers, isos and other files that are technically replaceable but painfully slow to rebuild. Backing up several terabytes of that can cost more than the server. Not backing it up means the recovery plan is basically cancel the weekend. None of the data is priceless. My time apparently is.

How do you draw the line: only back up what’s irreplaceable, or also anything annoying enough to rebuild