I can not over express how happy I am with having setup my NAS from scratch.
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My NAS was getting increasingly annoying.
It would give error messages about not being shut down properly after scheduled restarts.
Apps would sometimes work and sometimes not. I had to manually stop and restart my video library each time to make it work. It was slow, it was refusing to do more than one thing at a time.
So, I finally started it up. Shunted all the data to external drives, setup the box from scratch.
Between it being fresh, and me knowing better what I'm doing and how I want things from the get-go, it's running better than ever, better even than when I got it a few years back.
Interesting, while it was offline and being setup I found myself realising how integral it's become to my day. So much stuff I went to do, only to discover I needed my box.
It was intended as a file backup and server, but so much has changed since then, I've grown used to having it here!
Still tempted to get an upgrade, maybe later this year if things workout well with the cash.
Wanted to share this with a community who can appreciate the feeling of having something working well!
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S [email protected] shared this topic
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this is awesome! makes me excited to setup a new nas later this year
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encouraging
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It's best if a NAS remains as a dedicated NAS and nothing else, that way if you're experimenting and fuck something up, it doesn't take your data with it when it goes down. I would build a separate machine to tinker with; share the appropriate folders on the NAS with whatever service(s) you're running.
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I have to look how's the uptime like for my RPI 4 1GB NAS (with just Pi-hole added) right now. Must be over a year I reckon. Just bare bones RPI OS server running.
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This, plus also it's good to revisit your setups from time to time to audit and improve.
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Separate your services if possible. NAS just needs to store files. Eggs in one basket, fault tolerance yada yada.
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On the other hand, having one home server that does it all has its advantages. I have a mini PC with an N100 processor and two HDD drive bays. It hosts my Docker containers and holds my data. As long as you install all the software on the internal drive and keep only the data on the HDDs in RAID, you should be pretty safe. I hope. So far I've managed not to fuck it up.
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Having just a single drive doesn't really provide a lot of security.
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That's what containers are for. Fucking up the container won't fuck up the host. That was the best decision in self hosting I've done. Even that one virtual machine feels weird and uncomfortably legacy now but it needs to interact with hardware in a certain way that just won't fully work with docker.
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That'd be great. Love to get a bigger better setup and just leave this one to run the surveillance system
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So what OS are you running on your NAS?
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Tiny/mini/micro.
You can grab a used box for under $200. Most I've picked up have been around $100-$125, then I drop in a new m.2 for the host, maybe add/change ram depending on what I got it with.
Data lives on the NAS (really multiple for me, but besides the point here), and you'll get waaaayyyyy more compute with a usff PC like that than you will with a pi or what a NAS can offer. They also run really light on power when you aren't putting the CPU to work, so budget friendly in a bunch of ways.
I've got a goal after a move my wife and I are planning to run the whole shebang on solar, with battery and a switch to utility power. I've got 10 of these little monsters now, after a recent addition, and its quite doable from my measurements of actual power usage.
Which is a really long way of saying you may want to look at some tiny/mini/micro PCs.
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You can have more than one drive on a pi, either USB, or they sell sata boards
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That's what I'm doing. Here's my setup:
- BTRFS RAID W/ snapshots - can always roll back
- OS installed on SSD - can always reinstall without messing with the RAID
- containers installed on SSD (also BTRFS W/ snapshots) and backed up to RAID; only access RAID through bind mounts (ro if possible)
It's incredibly unlikely that I'll mess anything up on the host, but I can always reinstall if needed.
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Yes, I have 2x 4TB external drives in a Snap Raid config. Works great for years.
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I've done this before. That's why I have a Proxmox cluster separate from my NAS now.
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How do you connect them? Via SATA? Do you have a drive enclosure?
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Setup: noun (set-up)
Set up: verb
You need to pick the right lane, man.
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Why's that?
