NAS for my parents

[Gatherer]

So, my parents just started RV full time and my mother is a professional Genealogist. She needs off-site, internet accessible storage and all the web services that she has seen are out of her price range for how much she needs to store. She has a lot of files 4-5tb and going up as we digitize her physical books. I know that I could build a NAS to hold it all but was wondering what the best way to do it was.

Needs:

20tb minimum- more would be better not including backup and if there is future additional possible, that would be great.

back up capable- I believe that is is RAID 1 but would like opinions on that

Access thought internet from remote location - the NAS will be at my house and she will be traveling.

Mainly photos and document scans but there will be some video.

Little daily access from outside of network but I would like to move my Plex media over to it also. 

 

Would be willing to put things together but don't have a lot of personal experience to building computers. First build was about a year ago or so.

I do have an old All-in-One that I could use as the brains if that would help but need to know what else to get and what NAS software to use (TrueNas etc.)

 

thanks

 

[HanZie82]

Redundancy isn't the same as a backup.
The first just means you can have hardware failures without losing data. (Might have to be calculated to recover)
The 2nd means there is another full copy of the data.

 

 

The easiest would be to get a all in one system like Qnap or Synology box.
But if you can do the initial setup, and maybe explain some things i would highly suggest going for the more robust way and build your own.

And then if you don't need much virtual machines and such, TrueNas would be a very good starting point.

 

edit:

And if RV means the caravan with an engine thing, you might want to look into an all in one box from a reputable brand, as those use very little electricity.
Some can even work at or under the 20 Watt mark.
And a self built just uses that up for the motherboard alone (no RAM no CPU)

[manikyath]

34 minutes ago, HanZie82 said:

And if RV means the caravan with an engine thing, you might want to look into an all in one box from a reputable brand, as those use very little electricity.
Some can even work at or under the 20 Watt mark.
And a self built just uses that up for the motherboard alone (no RAM no CPU)

if this is the case, something like a synology with an external power supply is a very easy 'hack' to run straight off the DC power system.

 

on topic:

if you dont mind the very "closed box, if it breaks you just buy a new one" ecosystem, synology is great. it's as plug-and-play as you could imagine it to be. it has great options for automated backups, rotating backup disks, synchronizing two boxes, etc.

 

if you want something with bare metal access on standardized hardware, i suppose DIY build with truenas is currently the place to be.

[uzivkovic97]

2 hours ago, Gatherer said:

Would be willing to put things together but don't have a lot of personal experience to building computers. First build was about a year ago or so.

 

If you built regular PC, it's pretty much the same. You could hook up two 12TB drives, put them in RAID 1 (I don't know equivalent name for it in TrueNAS / ZFS file system) and you are good to go. And some SSD for OS of course.

[wseaton]

Nobody is addressing the entire question the OP is asking.

 

The NAS part is easy. It gets asked all the time. Get a Synology, throw big drives in it. Done.

 

The real part of the question is remote access. So, the OP is trying to set up his own cloud file services site for his traveling parents.

 

This kicks the hornets nest of how to configure VPNs an other stuff since the built in connectivity services of commercial NAS units has been terrible from a security standpoint. We now have all those questions about his ISP, what type of VPN to use, etc.

 

Honestly I would just store all the documents his mother need on external drives, make sure they are backed up, and not force her to need remote access to a basement file server from a location with terrible or no internet.

[Gatherer]

12 hours ago, wseaton said:

Honestly I would just store all the documents his mother need on external drives, make sure they are backed up, and not force her to need remote access to a basement file server from a location with terrible or no internet.

She is planning on having a external hard drive (currently has a 1tb) but will be needing a bulk storage system to dump files onto and backup storage in case something happens to that external drive. She will only be here every 6 months or so and is unwilling to wait that long before she backs up the external drive and would also like access to the files on the road. I may have to push harder for the store and dump option. 

[kardiff]

You should be able to setup wireguard with the synology unit as a client then should be able to hook it up to a cloud hosted in a docker container. But that is getting real hacky real fast. This would be the first step.  https://github.com/runfalk/synology-wireguard