Why is a UPS important for NAS and NFS?
My dad decided today that we (my dad, my brother, and I) should set up a network file system (NFS) hosted by one of our PCs, which are in the same room. After searching up information for this project, I realized how important people seem to think a UPS is. Since my dad does not like UPSs, I decided to try looking into why people consider it so important so that I could either show that UPSs are over-hyped and that I don't need it, or convince my dad that they are necessary and prevent him from implementing the NFS without one.
Unfortunately, I could only find threads explaining the importance of a UPS with very high-level explanations such as "to prevent data loss." What I am interested in is a bit lower-level, such as:
- Is a UPS more important for a NFS than a computer with entirely local storage and why?
- Is the UPS obsolete if I only have one for the NFS and not the computer using it?
- If the NFS is operating on one of the PCs and another PC is using it, can the capacitance of the NFS PC's power supply be enough, and is it even enough for a PC without a NFS to be "safe"?
- Is the scp command over SSH just as vulnerable to data corruption as communications with the NFS, and if it is, then why can't the NFS have the same protections?
Lastly, I would also like to know if anyone here has experienced data loss or corruption with their NAS or NFS from a missing or failed UPS. If you have, then I would appreciate any useful information that event provided you with.
I decided to include some detailed information about my planned setup. Firstly, my dad wants only the home directories on our PCs to be stored on the NFS. We are also planning on using our best PC as the NFS, which all three (including the host) PCs will connect to, and will not be using RAID due to having only one and not three available M.2 drives, but we might make a dedicated setup with RAID later on. Another idea we had was to have the NFS on a separate 10Gbps wired LAN, which would use the NFS host as a switch for the other PCs, cutting the independent router out of the system. Lastly-lastly, the software we are using for the NFS is nfs-common and nfs-kernel-server.
Addenda:
While NAS refers to a device, I have been informed that NFS strictly refers to a protocol, so each time I used NFS, I was really referring to a NAS that uses the NFS protocol.
The primary goals of this NAS are to allow me, my dad, and my brother to be able to use any of the three computers and be able to access project files and other documents that would usually only be available on one device, and to give the three of us some good experience. I don't think my dad intended to use it as a more secure storage with redundancy or as a backup, otherwise we would definitely be using RAID.
Not all of each user's home directories will be on the NAS. We have a way of implanting a local file/folder in a remote folder. Since making this post, I realized how bad it could be if certain folders were remotely stored and then accessed from computers with different Linux distros, so I will be putting more thought into what files are remote.
I will not be using 10Gbps ethernet because my motherboard is only rated to 1000 Mbps.