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.
If the data only needs to be read & written from a single server (and the others are just backups), you can also use simpler replication instead of synchthing. E.g. syncoid or TrueNAS replication. It sounds like you should be able to do that with separate datasets per household in your usecase.
We will likely read data from every location. That way people can access the data at full speed using WLAN
Read (only) access should be fine. What makes it complicated is if there can be writes from multiple locations. Basically, the simple version would be to just periodically copy the data from the primary to all secondary locations.
This will be for long term storage of files like family photos and document safe keeping, i.e. “let’s dump all our important files here so we don’t lose them”. Two people writing to the same file will practically never happen.