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.
cheapest is some decade old oem desktop ideally with as many sata ports as possible. the most flexible is whatever gives the most pci-e lane bandwith as they can be converted to most things. processor features most dont matter unless the NAS is also a media server, which you want an igpu that can do hardware encoding to whatever usecase you have.
i dont have a reccomendation on drive, but if you value drive redundancy, raid 1 (mirror) or raid 6(if youre using zfs, that would be zfs z2, this layout is basically requires 3 drives to die in order to lose data)
its on you on how you want to handle offsite backups be it cloud, or you having a clone that you manually backup offsite. pick whatever suits your needs
RAIDZ2 has 2 parity disks and thus can only withstand 2 drive failures, no?
can wirhstand 2, thus requires 3 drives to die to lose data, theyre the same thing.
Gotcha. I understand now re-reading your post, that’s a valid way of phrasing it.