DIY NAS - OS Two-Way-Sync

[frazzor]

Hi Guys!

 

I just got an old office server (XEON, 32GB RAM, hardware RAID, server board etc.) and want to build a NAS with it. There are a few things I need it to do:

 

1. be a NAS - smb, raid/zfs etc.

2. one or two virtual machines

2a. a few docker containers - I could run them inside the above mentioned vm if needed

3. real time sync with google drive

4. I'm pretty paranoid with my data, so a reliable sync/backup/snapshot option should be onboard. AWS S3 Glacier (Deep Archive) is a must.

 

Right now I use a consumer QNAP NAS which I'm pretty happy with featurewise except for the vm stuff. I have an old tower pc for that.

With my new server I'm searching the OS I should use.

I was trying TrueNAS Core & Scale and Unraid. TrueNAS Scale looks the best to me and I'd love to use it, but it lacks the feature of being able to perform a real time sync to GDrive. Unraid has the same issue as far as I know.

I know nextcloud/owncloud but for my small business I already pay for Gsuite and want to be able to work locally when home. I also tried nextcloud a few times in my life, and every time I was a little disappointed. The Gsuite client is just awesome and the QNAP sync is 100% reliable in my experience.

 

Do you have any idea which OS to use for my needs or any other tips? My final option is to flip the parts of the server and buy a bigger QNAP NAS - but I'd rather not 

 

 

TL;DR

Me, building NAS, need real time cloud sync, nextcloud doesn't work for me, already tried TrueNAS (misses feature) - which OS?

 

Thanks a lot in advance!!

Mo

 

[Kilrah]

Just been playing with both Truenas Scale and Unraid, and frustrated that there isn't one that I like overall...

Truenas scale is a bit too new and has few ready-made apps plus some configuration aspects for permissions, mappings etc are a bit overwhelming but the storage is solid and it does the things it says. Would need a lot of manual setup of Docker images that are one-click in Unraid...

Unraid has all the apps premade and configuration is easy but I'm not liking the storage paradigm at all with an array that doesn't work like you'd expect an array to and there's no way to change it. Their "cache that isn't actually a cache" and requires some babysitting is my main gripe...

 

As to the Google Drive sync it seems that even though there isn't an app called that rclone is what you want to use for it. 

Note that fot ZFS you want no hardware RAID.

 

Kinda starting to feel like running unraid as a VM on top of Truenas or such would be the "solution", but meh...

Need to have a go at recent proxmox too. 

[Needfuldoer]

48 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Truenas scale is a bit too new and has few ready-made apps

TrueCharts has most of the common ones covered as Docker containers. Config integration could be a little smoother, though.

 

[Kilrah]

Oh stupid me, I was fooled into thinking TrueCharts was the provider of the 10ish built-in ones. 

 

Just added a parity drive, that test machine is becoming a mess

 

[frazzor]

On 6/24/2022 at 10:06 AM, Kilrah said:

As to the Google Drive sync it seems that even though there isn't an app called that rclone is what you want to use for it. 

Thanks a lot!

I looked into it and it really seems like rclone is what I'm searching for. Unfortunately truecharts does not have rclone implemented (yet?). So I don't see a option to integrate it to TrueNAS Scale without it being a command line tool, which I'm not comfortable using as a main sync on my productive business data..

 

Has anyone maybe implemented rclone and knows how to? 

[Kilrah]

Haven't used rclone since I got rid of all the big name cloud solutions with my own nextcloud a couple of years ago, but I've done a good day more of dicking around with these OSes, redid a full clean install of Truenas Scale and this time adding the Truecharts repo, tried setting a few things up and IMO it's really unpolished, there's no documentation whatsoever on the truecharts ports and what settings are what in their container implementations and I feel like there is a few too many "click next because I have no freaking idea what that section is about" to my liking. Also simple things like adding a share and then having to figure out why you can't write to it and having to wrangle with raw permissions, this should "just work".

 

Wiped it all and did the same clean install with unraid and I'm coming up to terms with its storage, the "cache" being handled by moving files around actually has the advantage of speeding up both reads and writes, the thing is that it means is you do want dual cache drives (that will be RAID1'd) because obviously what's set to always be on the cache isn't going to be on the protected array. But there are tools to set up scheduled backups of important things to the array too, and I've been able to easily set up a scheduled backup of that to a separate machine altogether.

 

Proxmox - forget it, it's pretty much bare unless all you want is VMs and unraid does VMs just fine, particularly well actually since I could pass through my iGPU to one in a couple of clicks... 

 

So yeah if I'm to go ahead and build something it'll be with unraid.