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?
You already sound like you’re down the rabbit hole! If I could restart I would probably do a DIY server instead of a synology NAS. It’s just really satisfying how much stuff you can offload onto the NAS itself. And Synology are notorious for using weak components for that type of thing. Transcoding can be particularly weak depending on the model, which if you’re wanting to host content with Jellyfin, may give you some regret. That said having a synology NAS and a NUC could be a great solution. Or you could just make a DIY with a jonsbo case that can handle most anything you can throw at it and be extensible when you go further down the rabbit hole. All things considered if I could redo it all, I would go this route.
Some advantages: can upgrade CPU, slot in GPU for transcoding and other types of work, upgrade ram, no hacks to use NVMEs as a volume, can probably find a board with native 10g networking to avoid using up a pci slot, more pci slots.
Disadvantages: easier to footgun, no shr raid but you seem set on raid 6 anyway.
The thing that attracted me most to Synology is that they have pretty braindead simple software, I assume their systems have decent power management given the low hardware specs, and Hybrid Backup, Snapshot Replication, and Active Backup for Business seem to be a solid set of remote backup options which I couldn’t find simple, non-proprietary alternatives for. Plus, it would be nice to have a NUC or Optiplex separate since I don’t know if running a NAS off them would be the best idea but they’re also cheap and have great power management (I think I saw a 200W 80+ platinum PSU in an optiplex with a i5-7500, which seems like a great value alone). Ultimately I’m just not sure if there’s a way to combine the pros of each of those solutions together to avoid the annoyances of maintaining two systems and trusting Synology’s hardware and software to keep my system running smooth long-term.
Also honestly I just picked RAID 6 cause I heard most people prefer to rely on RAID levels that tolerate more than one disk failure. Is SHR any good even though it’s proprietary?
I assumed there was some great open source alternatives to any of these. That’s surprising to be honest. And yes Synology is very simple, and this has pros and cons. It doesn’t your shit can’t get rocked. I had some issue with certificates and it took two weeks of downtime to get back up and running.
NUCs provide fairly good value for the machine but ultimately you don’t avoid any of the work adding a synology to the mix. But if it seems like a good value why not pick one up for a rainy day?
I only use SHR-1 which has one parity drive. This is for a 6 bay. It’s just as performant as raid. The benefits are being able to add new drives without wiping all the data first, and being able to have multiple drive sizes. in raid, if you have multiple drive sizes, each drive is cut down to the size of the smallest drive in the array (at least from what I know).
I haven’t looked very hard so there could be backup services I’m missing. So far I’ve found restic/autorestic and duplicati, but I’m not sure what their differences in purposes are or pros/cons between them.
Also I’ve heard Unraid has a flexible storage solution which would be nice as I would like to just upgrade as I go instead of planning substantial disk upgrades, but are there also solutions for that on custom built systems instead of SHR?