Classic power failure and raspberry pi with SD cards. When I last set up things for my parents, I simply imaged a bunch of SD cards and had the data stored on an external hard drive. I live in the US and they live in India and this is for their RaspBMC. With the SD cards they just swap a broken one with a new one and call it a day.
Been 12 years or so now. Went back to their home a few years ago and everything but the opensubtitles integration works. I was surprised. I could never recreate it now. Even has one of these flirc setups so the remote works.
India has unreliable power too so the SD card death was inevitable. I made a few more images and called it a day.
Abusing frontier AI to determine what the hell I did with ancient installs, and then modernizing it, as been quite useful.
This is why I'm looking into using Guix / Nix for when my home server dies and I need a replacement. Declarative setups make too much sense. The only form of history I have of the weird shit I did with a Mac mini running debian + a LaCiE HDD hub is my .bash_history file, which a chatbot was able to figure out for me.
My modern server infrastructure is managed in this style. Not declarative, but the manner of management is an idempotent bash script (terraform being the “heavyweight” version of this that I discarded).