I believe this is a slightly controversial topic, at least from what I have gathered so far. Some say its best to leave the server on to spare the life time of the spinning rust. Other seem to prefer to save power and boot the server off each night. So wanted to chip in and hear what folks here do and why do what you do.
Bonus question; Do you guys have a UPS? Is it a must have for a homelab, or does it just depend on the usecase?
Same here. I would say total power outages are a bit more rare than every three years. But we had some failure last year and two years before that a neighbor dug through some cables and most of the street went dark. Sometimes I contribute and plug in some (old) electrical device that isn’t okay anymore. This year I got some water into the extension cord while cleaning outside… And since we have ground fault protection for the house, I had to reboot everything. The server and the 4 harddisks in it are perfectly fine. And have been for like a decade. I don’t think I need to pay for an UPS and the additional power it needs.