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.

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
    41·
    1 day 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.zipOPEnglish
      3·
      22 hours 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.techEnglish
        3·
        19 hours 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.

        • Bubs@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
          1·
          18 hours ago

          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.