Hello all! As the title suggests, I’m looking for some help and recommendations for starting a NAS storage/backup between a few households in my family.
Apologies if this isn’t the right place to ask this. This will be my first entry into something something like this, so I’m not entirely sure where to go.
What I would like to do is have an enclosure in each house and have them all sync together. Two drives will be necessary since I’ll use one drive just on my own since I have a lot of files to store. The other drive I would like to partition so that each household can be given a set amount of storage.
The rest of my family isn’t very tech savvy, so I would prefer a solution that is relatively straight forward to setup and troubleshoot in the rare case I might need them to do something remotely.
I would like to keep the price of the enclosure reasonable since the rest of my family is pitching in on the costs.
Some extra info I copied from one of my comments:
- At this point, will have 2 houses, but likely 3 by next year.
- The first two will be a short drive away, but the third will be hours away.
- The houses are on 100/50Mb fiber. Very stable internet.
- Me being the tech person, I’ll access them every way that’s available. For the rest of my family I’ll likely set them up either with a hardwire or local network.
- We will be using them as part of a 3-2-1 backup for all of our files like photos or documents. I’ll be using the second drive for occasional video backup storage.
- The shared drive will probably be 5-10 TB, depending on how much storage each household wants. The second drive for me will be around 20TB.
- We want multiple units so we have multiple copies of all our important files in the event of something like a house burning down.
Another clarification:
We do want to access files from each NAS individually instead of having everyone connect to one master NAS. The storage will be used mainly for archival and backup, so version conflicts of individual files wont be much of a concern.
I strongly recommend ZFS as a filesystem for this as it can handle your sync, backup, and quota needs very well. It also has data integrity guarantees that should frankly be table stakes in this application. Truenas is an easy way to accomplish this, and it can run docker containers and VMs if you like.
Tailscale is a great way to connect them all, and connect to your nas when you aren’t home. You can share devices between tailnets, so you don’t all have to be on the same Tailscale account.
I’ll caution against nextcloud, it has a zillion features but in my experience it isn’t actually that good at syncing files. It’s complicated to set up, complicated to maintain, and there are frequent bugs. Consider just using SMB file sharing (built into truenas), or an application that only syncs files without trying to be an entire office suite as well.
For your drive layouts, I’d go with big drives in a mirror. This keeps your power and physical space requirements low. If you want, ZFS can also transparently put metadata and small files on SSDs for better latency and less drive thrashing. (These should also be mirrored.) Do not add an L2ARC drive, it is rarely helpful.
The boxes are kinda up to you. Avoid USB enclosures if at all possible. Truenas can be installed on most prebuilt NAS boxes other than synology, presuming it meets the requirements. You can also build your own. Hot swap is nice, and a must-have if you need normies to work on it. Label the drive serial number on the outside so you can tell them apart. Don’t go for less than 4 bays, and more is better even if you don’t need them yet. You want as much RAM as feasibly possible; ZFS uses it for caching, and it gives you room to run containers and VMs.
It is indeed rather big and clunky sometimes, but there’s one feature that I really love that I could not really live without. I just tried out Seafile, but I didn’t like the whole “libraries” concept, because it made it very difficult to exclude certain subfolders that I didn’t want on a certain system or to sync multiple local folders to multiple remote folders. I’m using Nextcloud to sync my Documents, Videos, Pictures and Music folders across all of my devices, but I don’t need every single subfolder there downloaded to every single device that I use it on. I also use it to sometimes sync game save files for the ones that I don’t have on Steam. Would you happen to know a better solution than Nextcloud for something like this? I’m currently migrating it from a Raspberry Pi 2 to an older laptop that I have laying around, and I’d happily use a different syncing solution for this, and set up other features that I used (CalDAV, CardDAV) on other containers.
P.S Syncthing looks like what I might need, but I do wonder how I can make public share/upload links with it.
Yeah, syncthing can do all of that except public share links. Run an instance on your NAS so there is always a sync target online.