Tech gurus, need NAS setup help

The data is important, but it is in the 10s of GB of data and I do the old old school method of back up by copying to backup locations/drives/removable SSDs etc. The purpose of the NAS is simply convenience of access by people on the network.

 

My current specific knowledge to NAS implementation is low, my skillset it moderately high, my motivation to spend a lot of time on it for its purpose is low. I used to use a WD world drive. It was always slow to access, transfer data, etc. It was unreliable and failed way too soon. I switched to just using a share which has its drawbacks. I want it simple but relatively fast and reliable access for daily use

 

A NAS does not negate those but it does give you a second place to backup that data to that is not the machine is lives and was generated on. That's 2 copies so you'd still want another copy on a different medium or at least offsite. I currently house about 5 TBs of data on a 20+ TB array at home. I keep no data on our daily use machines. It looks local but is actually remote storage on the array connected via iSCSI. That lives on a separate ZFS array from what I would call the second copy of the data on a separate ZFS array. The most important of that data is replicated offsite to my in-laws house on a Truenas machine I run for them. Their important data replicates to an array here. That gives us two copies that are geographically disperse and stored on different media. The final copy of that data is on two 4 TB drives that I rotate out twice a year. For me to classify data as important enough to move offsite it has to be something I can't replicate easily. Documents, photos and such. Music and movies I can always rip again from the physical media so I don't bother making more than one copy of those.

The last piece of the puzzle was kicking Google out of my life via a Nextcloud instance I run for us to keep live backup of our phones. Makes the wife's phone easier to deal with when it time for a new one.

I do not expect most others to want to do this for home use.

 

Dafuq is iSCSI?

Haven’t deal with SCSI since Apple adopted IDE and USB became the architecture standard for peripherals.

 

Literally SCSI over IP. Works damn well.

 

What? No DIP switches and address conflicts and terminators and cable length echoes? Hawt damn!

 

It's handy. I run a little media center machine on every TV in the house. They have local SSD storage for the OS but the storage for TV buffering and recording lives downstair in the server rack and handed to the over iSCSI. Keeps the TV buffer from constantly writing to and killing the SSD.

 

I've used iSCSI for all sorts of things, but I just found out about NBD and am loving that for my older kit. Much thinner to implement than iSCSI, FCoF or NVMEoF, faster than NFS, got a 486 using it for rootfs / swap and happily hammering away.

 

You sound about where I was a year and a half ago. I had all the hardware laying around to try 2 different homebrew options, 1 pc based, and one pi based. Made them both work and if it was just me would have stuck with the pi option because it was lower power consumption than the old pc. I didn't want to expend the level of effort it would take to integrate my family's needs with either of these and ultimately went with Synology. I have 2 connected via wireless bridge in seperate locations to backup the important files.

 

Other than the fact that it's not free, I prefer a dedicated NAS over standing up a small PC share because it is compact and very low power (<15W). You can set the drives to power down after inactivity so it ends up using less than that most of the time. I like Synology due to their still providing updates for devices > 5 years old, though I'm sure there are plenty of brands that work well. They are very capable and have apps to do almost any kind of network service you might do on a PC (DHCP server, video transcoding and streaming, VPN, backup schedules, support for all kinds of file sharing protocols, surveillance recording, etc.). If you really care to do more advanced stuff than the apps provide, you can enable SSH and do some amount of regular Linux things. You can access remotely using the cloud stuff, but if you don't like that (I don't) -- I have it hosting a VPN that includes only the NAS, so I can use OpenVPN from my phone or my computer on the road and get to my files directly.