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?
Entirely depends on the usecase. If it’s a NAS and you only watch a few movies in the evening: Turn it off.
I bult a fairly power-efficient server. Consumes less than 20W and spins down the harddisks if not in use.
I can’t turn it off because none of the lightbulbs in the house would turn on anymore, my website would go down, my Fediverse instance wouldn’t pull any posts from American people who are awake during parts of the night. My emails and chat messages wouldn’t get delivered.
I don’t have a UPS. Also depends on the circumstances. I use ext4 as a filesystem which is kind of robust enough to handle power outages. And they’re rare where I live. A UPS would draw additional power and cost money. It’s not worth it for me at home.