I’m thinking of backing all of my family’s digital assets up. It includes less than 4 TB of information. Most are redundant video files that are in old encodings or not encoded at all and there are a lot of duplicate images and old documents. I’m gonna clean this stuff up with a bash script and some good old manual review, but first I need to do some pre-planning.
- What’s the cheapest and most flexible NAS I can make from eBay or local? What kind of processors and what motherboard features?
- What separate guides should I follow to source the drives? What RAID?
- What backup style should I follow? How many cold copies? How do I even handle the event of a fire?
I intend to do some of this research on my own since no one answer is fully representative but am appreciative of any leads.
I would just backup to an external drive or whatever locally. If you want a NAS, a simple SBC will do. If you really want RAID, get an old optiplex and hook up a couple drives in RAID-1.
For drives, get some CMR WD drives under warranty.
Keep one copy encrypted in the cloud, one offline local, another offsite not overly near you.
Also doing something pretty similar to OP and do not anticipate needing any more than 4TB for awhile, first I have seen of external drives being approved. (Only own laptops, very intimidated by all this SATA stuff right now—am new and every time I try to learn more on r/datahoarders I feel slammed by information overload.)