Since the appliance is also published as an image for the RasPi4, I guess this a recommendation assuming lots of clients and storage or is the appliance working in a way that makes ECC-RAM mandatory or highly recommended in every scenario?
Assuming the same amount of clients and storage (currently 2 local 8TB btrfs disks, no cloudstorage), is the appliance more likely to run into problems without ECC-RAM compared to UrBackup?
Depends on the storage setup, I guess. Pure btrfs has gotten better at detecting corruption before it gets written to disk while there is no such mitigation in the appliance cloud/RAID storage.
The requirement is a way to avoid having to look into support cases that may be RAM issues.
I was in the running without ECC RAM is find crowd, so I build an appliance test server without ECC RAM (it’d would crash obviously and randomly if RAM goes bad, right?). The appliance started corrupting its storage, I started looking into it assuming it is a software problem, a lot of time spent debugging… memtest86(+) came back clean with even stuff like the mutli-threaded mode. Only running multiple memtester instances simultaneously on Linux found the issue. Would not recommend. Not worth the time spent investigating once there is a problem (and the corruption it might cause) if you’re able to spend a bit more for ECC RAM (which one can’t for raspberry pi or other SBCs).