Nas for homeuse

Halfdan · October 28, 2021

I have a Pc, which i use mostly for gaming. But also to work on Uni stuff, do programming etc. I also have a Laptop and a Phone. Same for my Girlfriend, she has a Phone and a Laptop.
I wanted to buy a NAS for saving our data externally and have aceess to it from different devices.

What would you recommend? Also, do i recognize a difference between saving/opening my stuff on the NAs or my SSD thats build in to my pc?

Additionally i really have to start to backup my stuff. How should i do this? With an external Hardddrive and Cloud or a sepparate disk in the Nas & Cloud/externad drive?

jaslion · October 28, 2021

Ok so here is the best backup solution on a small budget:

Get a generic dell,hp,... whatever FULL TOWER from ebay preferably one that can use normal psu's. Spec wise 8gb of ram and a core i3 second gen or up is plenty.

Get 1 ssd to put the os on/as a small cache 128gb is plenty and 2 hdds of a decent size second one being bigger than the first.

Install truenas and make it so that it backs up all files to the second drive WITH files history of a couple instances.

Then make the whole truenas server upload to a cloud backup.

For automatic file backup of local files on the devices you can use multiple sync software that copies selected locations from the device to the nas.

An alternative way to do it is to just use windows but do everything the same this makes it easier for things like backblaze which is a cheap cloud backup solution to work. Otherwise with truenas you'll have to spoof the network drive as a local drive in windows for backblaze to back it up or get a more expensive cloud storage service.

As for nas this whole backup solution is your nas but only the one smaller hard drive of the 2.

As a rule always have 2 places where your data is backed up to preferably one off site.

Also if you have media like movies, music,... you could opt to get a i7 desktop from ebay and use plex to stream it to your devices. All a bunch of options you have.

RockSolid1106 · October 28, 2021

How much storage do you think you'll need? What would be your transfer speeds?

10 minutes ago, Halfdan said:

Also, do i recognize a difference between saving/opening my stuff on the NAs or my SSD thats build in to my pc?

No, for the most part. Unless you're opening up larger files like videos, you wouldn't notice any difference.

11 minutes ago, Halfdan said:

What would you recommend?

Just buy an old PC, with some decent specs(I'd say some old i5 with 8GB RAM would be fine. Put some hard drives there, plug it into your switch/router and you should be good. Install Windows if you want the setup to be easy or if you want to go a bit advanced, something like TrueNAS(FOSS).