Looking for Home Server Backup Solution

[zeusthemoose]

Hello everyone,

 

I am currently looking into getting a server for my house. My goal is for it to be a place where all the devices in my house will automatically backup to. I have around 15 devices (including iPhones, iPads, computers running various versions of MacOs, and some windows 10 machines) that I want to backup to it. They are not using much data (probably less than 1tb) so I was thinking that something with a few terabytes in raid 1 would be the ideal configuration. If possible it would be cool if I could view pictures and stream videos from it remotely but it sounds like that would make it much more complicated and expensive.

 

My problem is that I have absolutely no experience with servers and am very lost. That's why I am here. So, the question that I currently have: Is there a solution for servers that would allow me to easily do this? If not, is it even possible? I dont have a set budget, but the less expensive the better. Also, what kind of hardware should I be looking at for this? It would be ideal if I could build a system (just because it sounds fun) but if a prebuilt option exists, I am more than open to it. The smaller and quieter the better as it will be located in a bedroom where it will be hardwired to the router.

 

Thank you in advance!

[Electronics Wizardy]

What model nas?

 

Raid is not a backup, so don't do that as a backup set. THere are a lot of things that raid doesn't protect data from, like user errror, corruption and others.

 

Id probalby just setup a cloud storage as a backup, or you can do external hdds, and rotate between a few.

[zeusthemoose]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

What model nas?

I have nothing setup right now. What kind of hardware I should look into was one of questions I had.

 

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Raid is not a backup, so don't do that as a backup set. THere are a lot of things that raid doesn't protect data from, like user errror, corruption and others.

Isn't raid 1 redundancy in drives? I was thinking it would be needed in case the drive fails so I still had a copy of the backups

 

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id probalby just setup a cloud storage as a backup, or you can do external hdds, and rotate between a few.

I considered a cloud solution, but the main issue is that not all the devices are mine. The other people who would be backing up to it either really dont know much about technology (and dont understand/think backups are important) or are already backing up to a cloud provider. The issue with what they are already using is when they needed the backup recently, the cloud was corrupted and they lost all their files and pictures so they are not likely willing to pay for a second cloud option.

However if there is a reliable cloud storage plan that you know of that is set and forget for all kinds of devices, I would definitely appreciate the recommendation.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, zeusthemoose said:

have nothing setup right now. What kind of hardware I should look into was one of questions I had.

If your new to this, id probalby go synology for the easy of use, a 2 bay should do fine here. Then you can use thier software to backup the pcs, and has pretty good software to view media from other locations aswell.

 

Id backup the apple devices to their cloud, otherwise itunes it your only other real option.

 

THen you can use time machine to backup the macs, and something like veeam to backup the windows pcs.

 

1 minute ago, zeusthemoose said:

Isn't raid 1 redundancy in drives? I was thinking it would be needed in case the drive fails so I still had a copy of the backups

 

raid 1 is redundancy, but its not backups. You still need a backup of the nas to something like a external drive or a cloud solution.

 

[zeusthemoose]

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

If your new to this, id probalby go synology for the easy of use, a 2 bay should do fine here. Then you can use thier software to backup the pcs, and has pretty good software to view media from other locations aswell.

 

Id backup the apple devices to their cloud, otherwise itunes it your only other real option.

 

THen you can use time machine to backup the macs, and something like veeam to backup the windows pcs.

This looks to be exactly what I was looking for. Thank you so much for your help!

[shoutingsteve]

Looks like i missed the boat on the conversation, but I think you should also consider FreeNAS.  I built a pretty good backup solution with it out of used parts.  The best part is, it is user-error proof.  My husband deleted a bunch of stuff and I was able to get it all back because of the snapshot feature.  Set it up for ZFS-2 (raid with redundancy for 2 drive failures) and you are impervious to most anything, even mobo failure if you keep a copy of your configuration file somewhere outside the machine.

I access it from my firestick, too, so it works great as a media server.  I had a little trouble getting macs to attach to it, but that is solvable with the following:

[zeusthemoose]

1 hour ago, shoutingsteve said:

Looks like i missed the boat on the conversation, but I think you should also consider FreeNAS. 

I’ll definitely look into it. Thanks for the suggestion!