2d 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.

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43 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.
  
  Is Synology still a good option? I remember them getting some flack a bit ago. Something about hard drives I think?
  I'll kept a look out for deals like that.
  
  oh yeah.... they're "white labeling" their own brand of drives and if you use anything else it'll removed at you. I think for now it still lets you, but their OS definitely shows you're not using a "proper" drive. May want to keep an eye on that.
  
  Having read some stuff on that drama, I got looking into Asustor NAS units. Their entry one looks perfect for our general use and has all the apps and features I think I could use.
  
  Try it out, just make sure their software isn't so locked down that there's no way to send files in remotely
  
  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.
  
  I def need a massive drive just for me lol. I have multiple drives loaded full of files including an 8TB drive.
  
  Sounds like me.
  I have lots of stuff.
  My media files get replicated to my friends and family - that serves as "backup" for media, since it doesn't change (it grows but existing files don't change) the multiple copies works as backup. That's about 3TB.
  My other files (software, user data, phone files, etc) are in a proper backup process which is replicated to those other devices. Backup is compressed, and there's a lot of duplicate files so it really works.
  My total storage use is about 5TB, with perhaps 1TB changing in a given month.

43 comments