Looking for recommendations for a multi home NAS solution
-
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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]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.
-
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.
Having read some stuff on that drama, I got looking into Asustor NAS units. Their entry one looks perfect for our general use and has all the apps and features I think I could use.
-
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 want to write this in a separate post because I see many questionable suggestions:
Your scenario does not allow for a simple rsync / ZFS copy. That is because those only work with 1:many. Meaning one "true" copy that gets replicated a couple of times.
As I understand you have a many:many scenario, where any location can access and upload new data. So if you have two locations that changed the same file that day, what do you do? many:many data storage is a hard problem. Because of this a simple solution unfortunately won't work. There is a lot of research that has gone into this for hyperscalers such as AWS GCP, Azure etc. They all basically came to the same solution, which is that they use distributed quorum based storage systems with a unified interface. Meaning everyone accesses the "same" interface and under the hood the data gets replicated 3 times. So it turns it back into a 1:many basically, with the advantages of many:many.
-
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.
I'll caution against nextcloud [...]
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.
-
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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]If I understood you correctly then you want each NAS to have two storage pools.
Pool1
- bigger pool
- only your data
- part of a distributed storage across all NAS(?)
- backup 3-2-1
Pool2
- smaller pool
- shared to the home network it is a part of
- backup 3-2-1
Is this correct?
-
I'll caution against nextcloud [...]
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.
-
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 would probably go with a simple approach like this:
- ZFS: Each house gets a "NAS" that provides a ZFS filesystem to store the data. This gives you the ability to share the drives across your use cases (you, rest of the family), snapshots, RAIDZ support, and usage quotas. For the OS, you could use what you prefer (TrueNAS, Debian, Ubuntu, ...).
- Syncthing to synchronize the files across the servers/houses. This allows you to read and write data from anywhere and syncthing will mirror the writes to the other places. I use it to synchronize data across 5 devices and it works quite well.
There are probably more advanced (enterprise?) ways to handle the file synchronization. But, I think this hould be good enough for normal, personal use. The main disadvantage is that you're only synchronizing the current data (excluding the ZFS snapshots). On the other hand, this also allows you to mix file systems if necessary.
-
I would probably go with a simple approach like this:
- ZFS: Each house gets a "NAS" that provides a ZFS filesystem to store the data. This gives you the ability to share the drives across your use cases (you, rest of the family), snapshots, RAIDZ support, and usage quotas. For the OS, you could use what you prefer (TrueNAS, Debian, Ubuntu, ...).
- Syncthing to synchronize the files across the servers/houses. This allows you to read and write data from anywhere and syncthing will mirror the writes to the other places. I use it to synchronize data across 5 devices and it works quite well.
There are probably more advanced (enterprise?) ways to handle the file synchronization. But, I think this hould be good enough for normal, personal use. The main disadvantage is that you're only synchronizing the current data (excluding the ZFS snapshots). On the other hand, this also allows you to mix file systems if necessary.
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.
-
I want to write this in a separate post because I see many questionable suggestions:
Your scenario does not allow for a simple rsync / ZFS copy. That is because those only work with 1:many. Meaning one "true" copy that gets replicated a couple of times.
As I understand you have a many:many scenario, where any location can access and upload new data. So if you have two locations that changed the same file that day, what do you do? many:many data storage is a hard problem. Because of this a simple solution unfortunately won't work. There is a lot of research that has gone into this for hyperscalers such as AWS GCP, Azure etc. They all basically came to the same solution, which is that they use distributed quorum based storage systems with a unified interface. Meaning everyone accesses the "same" interface and under the hood the data gets replicated 3 times. So it turns it back into a 1:many basically, with the advantages of many:many.
I'll keep that in mind. Since you've pointed it out I can definitely see the technical difficulties of a system like that.
One thought I just had: could each individual NAS unit have its own 1:many? For example, the NAS in one house controls the backup for those people and the NAS in the second house controls the backup for them. That way each household can still access their own files through a wire if needed.
-
If I understood you correctly then you want each NAS to have two storage pools.
Pool1
- bigger pool
- only your data
- part of a distributed storage across all NAS(?)
- backup 3-2-1
Pool2
- smaller pool
- shared to the home network it is a part of
- backup 3-2-1
Is this correct?
There will probably be several pools. Each household will get a private pool. Then there will be a shared pool for stuff like family photos. Finally I'll have the second drive as my own pool. So there will be 4-5 pools on the small drive.
Each NAS will be identical so all data is mirrored to each one. That way if a NAS dies or something worse happens like a house burning down, we won't lose any files.
-
I would probably go with a simple approach like this:
- ZFS: Each house gets a "NAS" that provides a ZFS filesystem to store the data. This gives you the ability to share the drives across your use cases (you, rest of the family), snapshots, RAIDZ support, and usage quotas. For the OS, you could use what you prefer (TrueNAS, Debian, Ubuntu, ...).
- Syncthing to synchronize the files across the servers/houses. This allows you to read and write data from anywhere and syncthing will mirror the writes to the other places. I use it to synchronize data across 5 devices and it works quite well.
There are probably more advanced (enterprise?) ways to handle the file synchronization. But, I think this hould be good enough for normal, personal use. The main disadvantage is that you're only synchronizing the current data (excluding the ZFS snapshots). On the other hand, this also allows you to mix file systems if necessary.
I'll keep Syncthing in mind.
I'll probably go with an all in one NAS just to keep things simple for the less tech savvy people of my family.
-
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).
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.
-
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
-
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.
I def need a massive drive just for me lol. I have multiple drives loaded full of files including an 8TB drive.
-
I'll keep that in mind. Since you've pointed it out I can definitely see the technical difficulties of a system like that.
One thought I just had: could each individual NAS unit have its own 1:many? For example, the NAS in one house controls the backup for those people and the NAS in the second house controls the backup for them. That way each household can still access their own files through a wire if needed.
If you are sure that every household can only change their own data, and not that of anyone else, meaning there is only one "true copy" for every file, then yes, you can just replicate that to the other locations.
-
Having read some stuff on that drama, I got looking into Asustor NAS units. Their entry one looks perfect for our general use and has all the apps and features I think I could use.
Try it out, just make sure their software isn't so locked down that there's no way to send files in remotely
-
There will probably be several pools. Each household will get a private pool. Then there will be a shared pool for stuff like family photos. Finally I'll have the second drive as my own pool. So there will be 4-5 pools on the small drive.
Each NAS will be identical so all data is mirrored to each one. That way if a NAS dies or something worse happens like a house burning down, we won't lose any files.
wrote last edited by [email protected]A mirror isn't a full backup, are you sure you don't want to use something like restic?
If someone deletes a file it's gone, if a virus overwrites it good luck.You didn't specify if your pool should be a distributed one or one individual pool per nas.
-
I'll keep Syncthing in mind.
I'll probably go with an all in one NAS just to keep things simple for the less tech savvy people of my family.
Using syncthing to sync emulator save states over the local and public (nat'ed) network
Very reliable and good to configure.
-
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 have a Synology nas. They recently started thumbing their nose at budget/home users and if I had to buy new I’d consider QNap.
I would set up a nas at each location and enable quick connect.
I would set up a redundant drive pool and create volumes to avoid single drive failure.
I would set up the Drive services. This works just like Dropbox or onedrive. I believe there’s a component that allows Drive on one NAS to sync with Drive on another.
I would set up hyperbackup between the NAS and use Tailscale to avoid playing with firewalls, dns, NAT.
Advanced
I would set up federated authentication between the nas.I would set up firewalls and dns.
Clients
I would set up the photos mobile app for everyone.I would set up google/onedrive backups.
I would set up the Drive app on their machines.
-
I'll keep Syncthing in mind.
I'll probably go with an all in one NAS just to keep things simple for the less tech savvy people of my family.
I can see why you'd want to go with an off-the-shelf NAS. But, I would carefully check if it supports your use case, as it's quite advanced.
