Good afternoon all, I have half-assed my backups for 15 years, and it is not sustainable, and I need your help! I have the following setup: 1x Raspberry Pi 4 with a WD USB3 MyBook 4TB as a NAS target using OpenMediaVault. This works well enough, but is not in my mind a long term viable solution. 1x Apple Airport TimeCapsule A1355 2TB
I also have a smattering of other drives collected from over the years in MyBooks, all USB 2.0 drives, a 2TB mirror edition (2x 1TB drives in RAID 0 or RAID1), 1TB, and 500GB. This does not include the random 750 GBs, 500 GB and old 250 GB drives that I’ve taken out of my Macs and PCs over the years as I’ve upgraded them. I’ve got files scattered everywhere on them, plus on my MacBook and several other PCs and Macs around the house.
I need some help consolidating this into a single solution with priority to my photos and family home videos for data integrity. Then to a lesser extent, maybe PC backups and file storage.
Currently all of my photos are backed up to Google Photos or Amazon photos. With the fact that neither google or amazon is to be trusted with my photos, I’m ok with dumping them. Web based backup solutions are iffy, it takes forever for a backup to complete, as I am on a 60megabit download, with about a 5megabit upload connection. According to some things I’ve seen advertised nearby, fiber is being ran throughout the area, but it may be a year or two before it comes to my neighborhood.
For other hardware I have laying about, I have a 1st gen i7 980x system that is idle nowadays and is full of low capacity drives by today’s standards, a 2008 MacBook, the above mentioned 2012 MacBook Pro, an Atom n450 netbook, and an AMD Ryzen 5700g based prebuilt. None of them really seem to be something that would be useful as a ZFS based NAS or anything. But is a ZFS NAS or BTRFS system something that I need, or would my needs be better met by something else?
I have also looked at an OWC Mercurydisk M-Disc compatible burner for photo and video backup.
What are some options to look into? Preference would be on not breaking the bank and not necessarily set and forget it, but something I haven’t got to fight with to keep running.
Take a look at hosting your own Nextcloud instance. It’ll replace Google drive, photos, docs, everything–there’s phone apps for iPhone and android. If you want to store your PC backups on it, that’s probably fine too. It might even work ok on the Pi 4 (though some parts it has integrations with may have trouble, like Nextcloud Office, since they may not have ARM binaries in their distribution).
It should work great on your local network and still be acceptable when uploading out and about (photos can auto sync if you turn that on on your Nextcloud phone app).
If 4TB is enough for your needs, I’d suggest getting another 4TB and making them a RAID1 pair using mdadm, and then probably also another 4TB to make backups of Nextcloud and Nextcloud data onto to keep offsite. You can never have too many copies of your data.
I’m not sure what to do about the variety of smaller drives. I can say I wouldn’t recommend consolidating them onto a single drive, because I did that once (many drives ranging from 60 gigglebytes to 300, onto one 1.5 TB drive) and then formatted or got rid of the smaller ones…and then dropped the 1.5 TB drive on the floor while it was running. Rip. But just like the above, a RAID1 array composed of two big drives would probably be fine.
Just make sure to set up some alerts for when a drive fails.
Check out Immich for the photo backups. You can have multiple users with their own personal libraries. My family has Android and iOS backing up to my server right now, and its super nice to have it all consolidated.
Other than that, I second the nextcloud option. You can set the nextcloud app (which is available on all major OS) to auto upload pictures. Les Pas is a great way to view and manage a nextcloud photo library from Android.
Sorry for the double post, I don’t see how to edit a post with Memmy, but at some point I’d like to use Jellyfin or Plex. Is that something that needs to be separate, or can it be combined with the rest of this?
Look into unraid.
One upon a time I might’ve suggested FreeNAS/TrueNAS but now that unraid supports ZFS there’s not a really compelling reason except if you can’t afford the license fee (which is very reasonable $59-$129 for a lifetime license depending on the license you want. If you don’t want ZFS you can run a standard XFS file system that can be accessed by basically anything. Parity expansion and all the good stuff.
Just saw your additional comment. You can run dockers for Plex and more or full VMs.
They also sometimes do Black Friday discounts to buy a basic license and fully upgrade it).
Look at videos by spaceinvaderone for some examples of what it can do. I have two pro licenses and it’s easily the best computer purchase I’ve made in the last two decades.
Just some other suggestions, there’s also Syncthing (for backups and syncing devices) and PhotoPrism (like the user who suggested Immich, for gallery view.)
Second for nextcloud. Anything important on any of my devices is synced via my nextcloud.
