Restore strategy thoughts
I bought my Firewalla gold plus when I started to build my home network. It was during Covid and i didn’t even know what I was doing. I ran cat6 through the whole house. Bought some Unifi switches and started tinkering. I made the right choice in Firewalla and truly love it. My skill and network has expanded since then and i now have a full blown home lab with mostly 2.5 or 10g networking through the house and a 2.5 fiber connection. Yes way more than i need but it’s part practical but mostly hobby. I have several optiplex “servers” a couple synology NAS and more iot devices that i can name.….
I saw a post earlier today that was talking about potentially Firewalla as a software option rather than just existing as a hardware-software combo. And I had a terrifying thought. What happens if my Firewalla quits on me? I imagine the failure is relatively low and I have had zero problems in the six years that it’s been up and running…. But it’s a real concern for me now. I have Vlans, hardware segmentation, and i run WireGuard on it for when i am traveling. It is all set up and running well, but in the unlikely event that it goes down, I honestly have no idea how I would get it back up and running. My whole house. Including light switches door locks, alarm, system cameras, plex server (the whole homelab) etc.. rely on 2 pieces of hardware my Firewalla G+ and my UniFi cloud key.
I almost sprang for a gold pro today…. I was thinking about upgrading from the plus to a pro, not because it’s necessary now, but some future proofing, and so that I could use the gold plus as a backup in case there was an issue with the pro. I’m sure this is all way overkill, and the chances of failure are probably so small. I’m probably overthinking it, but the thought of waiting for a new box to ship out trying to figure out how to reconfigure it and get everything up and running all the while the Mrs. and the kiddos are losing their mind because they can’t watch TV play. They’re on online games, or turn the lights on and off.
Can anyone share their backup strategy or thoughts? How badly am I overthinking this and what it makes sense to have the backup or something else that I can do in the event that there is an issue or just purchase one and wait for it to arrive?
And before anyone tells me the gold pro is way way WAY overkill…. It likely is, but why not future proof a bit and have better hardware for a cost that i can justify over several years of use.