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.

  • truthfultemporarily@feddit.orgEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    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.