I actually did that. Or well, I was planning to upgrade the Debian version and instead of doing it in place I replaced the drive (kept the old around for a while just in case) and did a clean install. I didn't make any new backups or moved configs or anything outside what I already had, the system was back to operations faily quickly. The main reason, I have a markdown file describing every configuration and recovery step needed to get a fresh system to a fully working state in case of a disaster, and my test showed that it worked great. It does take a bit of effort to keep it up-to-date, but as shown, really worth it, and it douples as a small wiki for accumulated knowledge. I do wish to play with Ansible at some point if I have the time, but this works for now.

whenever the self hosting mood strikes, i try so much off the wall shit that it'd all be irrevocably broken if i wasn't able to scrap the whole day and reload last nights back up!

i keep each group of services in their own lxc so at least only a part goes down if so!

5 %, that many?

I tested mine involuntarily. I enabled full disk encryption on my the main drive of my server, ignored all the warnings and then noticed, that the whole drive was formatted.

Luckily, all the important data was in my backups, I lost some compose files and the database of my paperless ngx seems to be broken (although theoretically, I am sure I could recover that data, I just don't have that time and there is nothing that important on there).

You reapply/ reload database and do all the recovery procedure on a clean new installation for everything. Disaster recovery is much a thing together with backup. Depends on your infra how to proceed in concrete steps.

rm -rf /

(don't actually do this obv)

Restore a backup and make sure everything is where you left it.

proxmox style

apologies if that is not a lot of info!