Marijn

If the box does have a free internal port, mirroring two small SSDs as the boot device is an option a lot of these systems support natively, and it is cheap peace of mind for a machine you want to ignore.

Not necessary. But if the reason you are asking this question is that you do not want to think about the boot device again, that is the version that actually delivers it.

The trap in "empty the data path completely" is that a database directory usually contains dotfiles, and a plain wildcard delete misses them. So you look at what appears to be an empty directory, deploy again, and get the identical failure a fifth time.

List the directory including hidden entries before you conclude it is empty. This has cost me more time than I want to write down.

Better still, if your storage supports it: destroy the dataset and create a new one with the same name. There is then no question about what is in it.