Comment on Looking for recommendations for a multi home NAS solution
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 5 days ago
From my point of view, you have two separate things.
First, you have a “business”/user case, you need a way for people to sync data with you. For this, it’s a solved problem. Use Nextcloud/Owncloud/something with an app and a decent user experience for this. Whatever you like. On your primary “home” location, set this up, and have people start syncing data to you.
Second is the underlying storage. For this, again it’s up to you, but personally I’d have a large NAS at home (encrypted), which is sync’d to the other locations (also encrypted, so not even they can see it).
Their portal to this data storage is the nice user experience like Nextcloud. They don’t have to worry about how data is synced or managed. Nextcloud also supports quotas so you can specify how much they all get (so you don’t have to deal with partitioning).
This approach will be much less headache for you. I think I understand what you’re asking, where your original thought was just a dump of storage that is separate, but I think this is a better approach - both in terms of your sanity maintaining it and also their own usability.
Bubs@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
I took a look at Nextcloud and really like it from a usability standpoint.
My question is what would my hardware options be? A form factor like the off the shelf NAS units is ideal since they will have to go on shelves next to the routers. If it was just me, a server rack would be fine, but I gotta keep it clean looking and on the smaller side. Also, I would like to keep the hardware price per house not much higher than the $300 range (excluding hard drives).
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 5 days ago
I think you already know, AIOs are the go-to, just make sure you can connect in. I’ve done this with Synology, works fine, I used sftp to sync things. If you want cheaper you can look into a standard linux host and mergerfs/snapraid, but it’s going to be a much higher learning curve, and a much higher risk of failure. If you’re just getting up and started don’t overthink it. It’s good to plan for tomorrow, but think about how much data everyone has, and how much you’ll use today, and then double that. That’ll be a good baseline.
If you’re US based, a trick, buy the WD Elements drives from Best Buy. They go on sale regularly pretty much whenever there is a holiday sale and “shuck” them (plenty of videos on Youtube for how to do this). You’ll save probably double the cost on drives.
Bubs@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
Is Synology still a good option? I remember them getting some flack a bit ago. Something about hard drives I think?
I’ll kept a look out for deals like that.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 4 days ago
oh yeah… they’re “white labeling” their own brand of drives and if you use anything else it’ll bitch at you. I think for now it still lets you, but their OS definitely shows you’re not using a “proper” drive. May want to keep an eye on that.
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 4 days ago
Look for the mini pc’s that can hold a single (large capacity) drive.
Since you’re going to be replicating (and I assume actual backups), you don’t need multi-drive systems at each location unless you need more than about 12TB of storage.
Bubs@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
I def need a massive drive just for me lol. I have multiple drives loaded full of files including an 8TB drive.
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 4 days ago
Sounds like me.
I have lots of stuff.
My media files get replicated to my friends and family - that serves as “backup” for media, since it doesn’t change the multiple copies works as backup. That’s about 3TB.
My other files (software, user data, phone files, etc) are in a proper backup process which is replicated to those other devices. Backup is compressed, and there’s a lot of duplicate files so it really works.
My total storage use is about 5TB, with perhaps 1TB changing in a given month.