Need some help setting up my home server any info is useful thank you!

[Lachy0406]

Hi everyone, I live at home with my parents and they've asked me to build a home server for them.

 

The servers main use will be:

- Storage (Photos/Videos/Work Docs etc)

- Backups (Phones/Movies)

 

I would also like to set it up to be able to run things like Adobe creative cloud off the service to save space, main reason for this is majority of my family uses laptops so to save them as much space as possible I wanted to figure out how to set this up to run bigger programs like the Adobe sweet off the server.

 

Besides running programs directly from the server, the main issue I'm having is figuring out which configuration would be the best to maximize storage space whilst having enough to act as redundancy if something goes wrong.

I will most likely run 5-6 10TB NAS drives and just need some help on the setup side.

 

Any info on remoting in to server long distance to view things like photos and movies while away and remote managing stuff would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks a ton!

- L

[Dutch_Master]

We need a bit more info, really.

 

First, budget. How much are they willing to spend? Next, transcoding. Are you going to stream media from that server to devices at home? If so, do you need transcoding into different formats? And to how many devices at the same time?

 

Which leads us to the next point: prebuild or are you sourcing parts and build it yourself?

 

For the OS there are quite a few options, I suggest trying some first: TrueNAS Scale, Proxmox and UnRAID. Alternatives include (but not limited to) Linux Mint, Debian Stable and Ubuntu.

[Lachy0406]

3 hours ago, Dutch_Master said:

We need a bit more info, really.

 

First, budget. How much are they willing to spend? Next, transcoding. Are you going to stream media from that server to devices at home? If so, do you need transcoding into different formats? And to how many devices at the same time?

 

Which leads us to the next point: prebuild or are you sourcing parts and build it yourself?

 

For the OS there are quite a few options, I suggest trying some first: TrueNAS Scale, Proxmox and UnRAID. Alternatives include (but not limited to) Linux Mint, Debian Stable and Ubuntu.

For parts I already have them available to me so no need to spend money or anything unless things like HBA or Raid cards are need for a certain config, for the transcoding from memory all the devices I need to stream to can run the same format so no issue there. 

 

The devices at the same time would probably be a constant minimum of 2 people and going upwards to 5 at most, I'm familiar with the physical components side of the pc world but for setting up drives in things like raid and creating backups is where my knowledge stops. 

 

OS will either be Windows or Ubuntu as I have both available to me but I'm unsure which would be better for a simple application / file server

 

Thanks for your help

- L