21h ago

Looking for recommendations for a multi home NAS solution

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.

40 comments

From my point of view, you have two separate things.
First, you have a "business"/user case, you need a way for people to sync data with you. For this, it's a solved problem. Use Nextcloud/Owncloud/something with an app and a decent user experience for this. Whatever you like. On your primary "home" location, set this up, and have people start syncing data to you.
Second is the underlying storage. For this, again it's up to you, but personally I'd have a large NAS at home (encrypted), which is sync'd either in realtime or nightly (using something like cron/rclone) to the other locations (also encrypted, so not even they can see it).
Their portal to this data storage is the nice user experience like Nextcloud. They don't have to worry about how data is synced or managed. Nextcloud also supports quotas so you can specify how much they all get (so you don't have to deal with partitioning).
This approach will be much less headache for you. I think I understand what you're asking, where your original thought was just a dump of storage that is separate, but I think this is a better approach - both in terms of your sanity maintaining it and also their own usability.
- I took a look at Nextcloud and really like it from a usability standpoint.
  My question is what would my hardware options be? A form factor like the off the shelf NAS units is ideal since they will have to go on shelves next to the routers. If it was just me, a server rack would be fine, but I gotta keep it clean looking and on the smaller side. Also, I would like to keep the hardware price per house not much higher than the $300 range (excluding hard drives).
  
  I think you already know, AIOs are the go-to, just make sure you can connect in. I've done this with Synology, works fine, I used sftp to sync things. If you want cheaper you can look into a standard linux host and mergerfs/snapraid, but it's going to be a much higher learning curve, and a much higher risk of failure. If you're just getting up and started don't overthink it. It's good to plan for tomorrow, but think about how much data everyone has, and how much you'll use today, and then double that. That'll be a good baseline.
  If you're US based, a trick, buy the WD Elements drives from Best Buy. They go on sale regularly pretty much whenever there is a holiday sale and "shuck" them (plenty of videos on Youtube for how to do this). You'll save probably double the cost on drives.
  
  Look for the mini pc's that can hold a single (large capacity) drive.
  Since you're going to be replicating (and I assume actual backups), you don't need multi-drive systems at each location unless you need more than about 12TB of storage.

Your requirements are really unclear.
how many houses
how far are they apart (latency)
what is their internet connection like? up/downstream? Static IP? Is it stable?
how are they supposed to access the data?
what kind of data is it, and what is the access pattern? Meaning, is it text files? Occasional pictures? Movies?
how much data do you need in total (yours+others)
- 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.
  
  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.
- Not op but here for info of similar situation I've thought about doing. So
  how many houses
  Between 3-5
  how far are they apart (latency)
  Different towns for 1-3 houses and same road for 3 houses, including mine where NAS would be. So im assuming this is some cloud sharing thing but im looking to host it and not use Google photos anymore.
  what is their internet connection like?
  Everyone has high speed i think. 1gb/s I think.
  up/downstream?
  Always pee downstream. Idk what this is asking. Sorry
  Static IP? Is it stable?
  Yes to both but would like it to be accessible on mobile devices too.
  how are they supposed to access the data?
  Just looking for info on what to learn so whatever you recommend lol
  what kind of data is it, and what is the access pattern? Meaning, is it text files? Occasional pictures? Movies?
  Prolly 90% pictures & 10% video
  how much data do you need in total (yours+others)
  Shit idk enough to cover 3 families with multiple crotch fruit under 3 years old so 50,000TB+ range.

one nas device with a lot of power and a vpn for the other houses might be better.
- We want multiple devices so we can have extra backups of our important files. Power isn't really a major concern since this will be mostly for long term storage.
- I have had good luck with self hosted Headscale server and Tailscale clients on Pfsense routers creating a mesh network. But I am trusting other people's networks. So Tailscale clients on each computer and the NAS would be lower risk.

I'll share my experience with my very unprofessional but working setup.
I have two locations, both using retired PCs. I don't need anything fancy, but some considerations could be GPU/encoding hardware if you wanted something like jellyfin/Plex. I use proxmox and proxmox backup server for managing everything and so far it's been working well. Definitely not plug and play like an aio nas but that's because a nas wasn't my only goal as I needed cameras (frigate) and homeassistant.
I would highly recommend headscale/tailscale (as others have suggested) as it "just works" when setup in my experience. This enables safe remote access without opening any ports on your families networks so you can troubleshoot if something did break.
Regardless of which solution you decide to use, the most important part about having a backup is testing. If you can't see when your backups fail or don't know how to recover you may as well not have a backup.

I strongly recommend ZFS as a filesystem for this as it can handle your sync, backup, and quota needs very well. It also has data integrity guarantees that should frankly be table stakes in this application. Truenas is an easy way to accomplish this, and it can run docker containers and VMs if you like.
Tailscale is a great way to connect them all, and connect to your nas when you aren’t home. You can share devices between tailnets, so you don’t all have to be on the same Tailscale account.
I’ll caution against nextcloud, it has a zillion features but in my experience it isn’t actually that good at syncing files. It’s complicated to set up, complicated to maintain, and there are frequent bugs. Consider just using SMB file sharing (built into truenas), or an application that only syncs files without trying to be an entire office suite as well.
For your drive layouts, I’d go with big drives in a mirror. This keeps your power and physical space requirements low. If you want, ZFS can also transparently put metadata and small files on SSDs for better latency and less drive thrashing. (These should also be mirrored.) Do not add an L2ARC drive, it is rarely helpful.
The boxes are kinda up to you. Avoid USB enclosures if at all possible. Truenas can be installed on most prebuilt NAS boxes other than synology, presuming it meets the requirements. You can also build your own. Hot swap is nice, and a must-have if you need normies to work on it. Label the drive serial number on the outside so you can tell them apart. Don’t go for less than 4 bays, and more is better even if you don’t need them yet. You want as much RAM as feasibly possible; ZFS uses it for caching, and it gives you room to run containers and VMs.
- I'll caution against nextcloud [...]
  It is indeed rather big and clunky sometimes, but there's one feature that I really love that I could not really live without. I just tried out Seafile, but I didn't like the whole "libraries" concept, because it made it very difficult to exclude certain subfolders that I didn't want on a certain system or to sync multiple local folders to multiple remote folders. I'm using Nextcloud to sync my Documents, Videos, Pictures and Music folders across all of my devices, but I don't need every single subfolder there downloaded to every single device that I use it on. I also use it to sometimes sync game save files for the ones that I don't have on Steam. Would you happen to know a better solution than Nextcloud for something like this? I'm currently migrating it from a Raspberry Pi 2 to an older laptop that I have laying around, and I'd happily use a different syncing solution for this, and set up other features that I used (CalDAV, CardDAV) on other containers.
  P.S Syncthing looks like what I might need, but I do wonder how I can make public share/upload links with it.
  
  Yeah, syncthing can do all of that except public share links. Run an instance on your NAS so there is always a sync target online.

I want to write this in a separate post because I see many questionable suggestions:
Your scenario does not allow for a simple rsync / ZFS copy. That is because those only work with 1:many. Meaning one "true" copy that gets replicated a couple of times.
As I understand you have a many:many scenario, where any location can access and upload new data. So if you have two locations that changed the same file that day, what do you do? many:many data storage is a hard problem. Because of this a simple solution unfortunately won't work. There is a lot of research that has gone into this for hyperscalers such as AWS GCP, Azure etc. They all basically came to the same solution, which is that they use distributed quorum based storage systems with a unified interface. Meaning everyone accesses the "same" interface and under the hood the data gets replicated 3 times. So it turns it back into a 1:many basically, with the advantages of many:many.
- I'll keep that in mind. Since you've pointed it out I can definitely see the technical difficulties of a system like that.
  One thought I just had: could each individual NAS unit have its own 1:many? For example, the NAS in one house controls the backup for those people and the NAS in the second house controls the backup for them. That way each household can still access their own files through a wire if needed.
  
  If you are sure that every household can only change their own data, and not that of anyone else, meaning there is only one "true copy" for every file, then yes, you can just replicate that to the other locations.

If I understood you correctly then you want each NAS to have two storage pools.
Pool1
bigger pool
only your data
part of a distributed storage across all NAS(?)
backup 3-2-1
Pool2
smaller pool
shared to the home network it is a part of
backup 3-2-1
Is this correct?
- There will probably be several pools. Each household will get a private pool. Then there will be a shared pool for stuff like family photos. Finally I'll have the second drive as my own pool. So there will be 4-5 pools on the small drive.
  Each NAS will be identical so all data is mirrored to each one. That way if a NAS dies or something worse happens like a house burning down, we won't lose any files.
  
  A mirror isn't a full backup, are you sure you don't want to use something like restic?
  If someone deletes a file it's gone, if a virus overwrites it good luck.
  You didn't specify if your pool should be a distributed one or one individual pool per nas.

I would probably go with a simple approach like this:
ZFS: Each house gets a "NAS" that provides a ZFS filesystem to store the data. This gives you the ability to share the drives across your use cases (you, rest of the family), snapshots, RAIDZ support, and usage quotas. For the OS, you could use what you prefer (TrueNAS, Debian, Ubuntu, ...).
Syncthing to synchronize the files across the servers/houses. This allows you to read and write data from anywhere and syncthing will mirror the writes to the other places. I use it to synchronize data across 5 devices and it works quite well.
There are probably more advanced (enterprise?) ways to handle the file synchronization. But, I think this hould be good enough for normal, personal use. The main disadvantage is that you're only synchronizing the current data (excluding the ZFS snapshots). On the other hand, this also allows you to mix file systems if necessary.
- If the data only needs to be read & written from a single server (and the others are just backups), you can also use simpler replication instead of synchthing. E.g. syncoid or TrueNAS replication. It sounds like you should be able to do that with separate datasets per household in your usecase.
  
  We will likely read data from every location. That way people can access the data at full speed using WLAN
- I'll keep Syncthing in mind.
  I'll probably go with an all in one NAS just to keep things simple for the less tech savvy people of my family.
  
  Using syncthing to sync emulator save states over the local and public (nat'ed) network
  Very reliable and good to configure.
  
  I can see why you'd want to go with an off-the-shelf NAS. But, I would carefully check if it supports your use case, as it's quite advanced.

It's possible there is dedicate system to do this, I haven't researched it. But if not setting up syncthing would work. And if its a lot of data sync it local first then mail or drive the remote drive to them.

I have a Synology nas. They recently started thumbing their nose at budget/home users and if I had to buy new I’d consider QNap.
I would set up a nas at each location and enable quick connect.
I would set up a redundant drive pool and create volumes to avoid single drive failure.
I would set up the Drive services. This works just like Dropbox or onedrive. I believe there’s a component that allows Drive on one NAS to sync with Drive on another.
I would set up hyperbackup between the NAS and use Tailscale to avoid playing with firewalls, dns, NAT.
Advanced I would set up federated authentication between the nas.
I would set up firewalls and dns.
Clients I would set up the photos mobile app for everyone.
I would set up google/onedrive backups.
I would set up the Drive app on their machines.

I really wish NAS discussions had their own community.
- Why?
- That would be nice. Sadly, it doesn't seem like there's enough relevant people here on Lemmy to keep it active. At least not yet.

40 comments