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.

  • JPAKx4@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    5·
    20 hours ago

    I’ll share my experience with my very unprofessional but working setup.

    I have two locations, both using retired PCs. I don’t need anything fancy, but some considerations could be GPU/encoding hardware if you wanted something like jellyfin/Plex. I use proxmox and proxmox backup server for managing everything and so far it’s been working well. Definitely not plug and play like an aio nas but that’s because a nas wasn’t my only goal as I needed cameras (frigate) and homeassistant.

    I would highly recommend headscale/tailscale (as others have suggested) as it “just works” when setup in my experience. This enables safe remote access without opening any ports on your families networks so you can troubleshoot if something did break.

    Regardless of which solution you decide to use, the most important part about having a backup is testing. If you can’t see when your backups fail or don’t know how to recover you may as well not have a backup.