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.

  • Bubs@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
    5·
    1 day ago

    Those are good points to clear up.

    • At this point, 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 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.
    • truthfultemporarily@feddit.orgEnglish
      4·
      1 day ago

      So I think this can be achieved in different levels of complexity.

      First of all, you may want to look into ZFS, because there you can have multiple “partitions” that all have access to the entire free space of the device or devices, meaning you won’t need two separate drives. Or probably you want multiple smaller and cheaper devices that are combined together because it will be cheaper and more fault tolerant.

      You also need some way to actually access the data. You have not shared how that is supposed to work: smb/nfs, etc. In either case you need a software that can do that. There a various options.

      Then, you probably want to create some form of overlay network. This will make it so that the individual devices can talk to each other lime they are in the same lan. You could use tailscale/headscale for this. If you have static public IPs you can probably get around this and build your own mesh using wireguard (spoiler: thats what tailscale does anyway).

      Then, the syncing. You can try to use syncthing for this, but I am not sure it will work well in this scenario.

      The better solution is to use a distributed storage system like garage for this, but that requires some technical expertise. https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/

      Garage would actually allow you to for example only store two copies, so with three locations you would actually gain some storage space. Or you stay with the 3x replication factor. Anyway, garage is an object store which backup software will absolutely support, but there is no easy NFS/smb. So your smart TV, vanilla windows or whatever will not be able to access it. Plus side: its the only software you need, no ZFS required.

      Overall its a pretty tricky thing that will require some managing. There is no super easy solution to set this up.