Hey all, I’ve been doing a bunch of research on selfhosting the last few weeks as I’d love to lean on more open source projects for my daily productivity & entertainment. My main goal is to backup all my personal documents, photos, and videos (around 1tb so far over ~5 years, so not too demanding) and host a few services to access files on local storage (Immich, Jellyfin) and personal (paperless-ngx, homeassistant, morss). Although I’m not afraid to mess around learning Docker, I’d like to prioritize low maintenance in balance with relatively low long-term cost so that I don’t run into an issue that takes more than a day to restore access to my files/backups. I’d rather save that time for the fun stuff, like endlessly configuring HA automations.
All that said, I figure a decent solution would be to run a local NAS in RAID 6 with a cold storage HDD to swap whenever I transfer a bunch of files from my camera for local backup, and a remote backup at either my parents’ home or maybe eventually on another friend’s NAS. The main thing I’m wondering right now is if a prebuilt NAS (Synology, Asustor, etc.) is worth it in comparison to a custom built system for simple maintenance, reliable and low-bandwidth remote backup and recovery, and solid file sharing options for friends and family? I’ve heard SFTPGo is a great project for file transfers if going custom built, so I’m not completely worried about the last point, but it’d still be a nice bonus to not have to worry about another service.
My greatest fear is having to explain to my parents what a terminal is, so I’d like something reliable with a good price which I can hopefully maintain without crossing that bridge. I know most prebuilt NAS systems aren’t as cost effective or flexible for hosting a bunch of services also, so if I did go with a prebuilt, I would probably pick up a micro PC like a NUC or an old Dell Optiplex to network with the NAS for Immich, and maybe use some internal storage to keep some movies to stream with Jellyfin (unless there’s a limitation I’m not considering). Any advice?
If power usage and/or noise are concerns, I would steer clear of enterprise gear.
I started out with a Synology NAS, which died and took my data with it because of their proprietary software raid. I think you don’t need to worry about that these days, but I haven’t looked into it much. I haven’t gone back to a pre built NAS since.
Currently, my production setup consists of a Dell R720xd that runs pretty much everything, and a Dell R710 that runs as a backup TrueNAS server. It’s loud, sucks back about 550W, produces a ton of heat, and takes up a good deal of space when you add in the rack mount switch and ups. I just moved pretty far, and I decided to move my homelab to my dad’s house instead of taking it with me.
My plan is to migrate to a more reasonable setup incrementally. I’m currently building a proxmox ve host out of my old gaming PC (ryzen 2700x + gtx1060). I added 2x 10TB drives, made a mirrored zfs pool, and I’m running an openmediavault VM to share it on the network. I have another VM for home assistant, another for matrix/jitsi/etherpad, another for jellyfin/arr stack/sabnzbd with the GPU passed through for transcoding, another for swag/paperless-ngx/immich, and a final one for the MASH Ansible playbook. And I have a small fanless AliExpress PC running pfsense as a router/gateway.
The “ideal” final setup is to basically build another machine to put TrueNAS onto that will replace my openmediavault setup. I’m aiming for total average power draw to be under 100W.
My suggestion given my experience with different hardware is to scrap together whatever you can for cheap, run proxmox with openmediavault, and build the VMs for services whose data you don’t care much about first, then build a dedicated NAS running TrueNAS. The NAS doesn’t have to be fancy. It doesn’t need ECC ram. You could probably build a competent, compact NAS for about $400 without HDDs. Once you have the NAS, then build out services like NextCloud, immich, and paperless-ngx, where losing the data would suck. And then think about a backup solution for that data.