My iPhone is a pet. It’s a pet with a great backup system that turns a new pet into exactly my pet. But it’s still a pet.
There’s only one and it changes manually as I need features to change. I download and install things as needed, from gui, with no version control or script to manage it. It’s a pet.
It sounds like for you: hand-operated -> pet, automated/script operated -> cattle. I think the whole point of the analogy is about if things get slaughtered can you furnish a new one without batting an eye. If yes, then cattle, not pet. So I guess the question is: if someone stole your phone right now, would you blink?
> if someone stole your phone right now, would you blink?
Yes absolutely. I can afford a new one, and I would immediately buy a new one (well I’m already waiting for the newly released one but still). I would still be quite upset and my life would be interrupted at least a little.
I took the pet/cattle analogy to be about how manual the setup is, and how replaceable it is. I think apple has smartly blurred that line with great backup tech, but I would still consider the “lovingly” hand customized aspect of maintaining a phone solidly a pet. Some version of my current phone has been around for ~10 years through various hardware iterations, all restarted from a backup image. I would be distraught if i had to recreate it without a backup, just finding my apps, logging in, finding wallpaper, rearranging icons, setting up shortcuts, etc. Maybe that’s the ideal state for a home server - a nearly no-op backup and restart process that you still manage as you need
Proxmox + Proxmox Backup Server + external storage (I use my NAS) means I don't really have to worry about disaster, as such, because every VM is backed up nightly. VMs and the hypervisor can all be pets and I can just restore a backup if something happens.
If you're doing something for a hobby, treat it like the special snowflake it is to you. If you're doing something just to get things done, treat it like the utility it is. If you're at home playing around with machines in a homelab, feel free to baby your servers.
As far as disaster is concerned, it's not that difficult to install software that really needs minimal maintenance. But it comes down to what you want out of the software and hardware that you run.
