Looking to create a home file server of some sort

[Dubesta11]

For the longest time I have been wanting to make a server that would hold a lot of my fairly important or just large files, such as an extensive photo and video library (No Jared ). I would need to be able to access it anywhere, such as at my college or anywhere with wifi, as well as on my phone for smaller file access. I would probably want a decent amount of storage with enough parity to be able to loose a drive and still remain fully functional until I purchased another drive. What are my main options, like should it just be a computer with a specific OS or another type of device? Any solutions would be helpful!

[MoonlightSylv]

For the longest time I have been wanting to make a server that would hold a lot of my fairly important or just large files, such as an extensive photo and video library (No Jared ). I would need to be able to access it anywhere, such as at my college or anywhere with wifi, as well as on my phone for smaller file access. I would probably want a decent amount of storage with enough parity to be able to loose a drive and still remain fully functional until I purchased another drive. What are my main options, like should it just be a computer with a specific OS or another type of device? Any solutions would be helpful!

You can install FreeNAS on any computer but you will need a boot drive (or CD) and a storage drive.

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Whatever you do; don't do what Linus did.

[Dubesta11]

You can install FreeNAS on any computer but you will need a boot drive (or CD) and a storage drive.

 

I don't have a spare computer to keep over here, so I would have to build a complete system.

[Dubesta11]

Whatever you do; don't do what Linus did.

 

I don't know if I can afford that many SSDs

[MoonlightSylv]

I don't have a spare computer to keep over here, so I would have to build a complete system.

You can also buy a NAS like the WD My Cloud

[Kobrastachka]

I Use a smb share on a ubuntu computer, I also use it to run LAMP and its a plex media server. I recommend this over freenas because you can use the computer to do alot more things like running plex, owncloutd, or your own mail server.

[SaladFingers]

I'm using my old Mac Pro for the task. It has a drive shared to the network that can be accessed by everyone, another drive for me to send backups from my PC, and another drive that backups up the shared drive. Did not bother with RAID or ZFS, kept the whole thing simple. FreeNAS is very nice, but sometimes for home use any regular OS will be just fine. 

[Dubesta11]

I'm using my old Mac Pro for the task. It has a drive shared to the network that can be accessed by everyone, another drive for me to send backups from my PC, and another drive that backups up the shared drive. Did not bother with RAID or ZFS, kept the whole thing simple. FreeNAS is very nice, but sometimes for home use any regular OS will be just fine. 

 

I want to focus a little on backing up as well, so all the files should be locally backed up multiple times in the same system, and possible set up an online backup. So something like RAID would be almost necessary, even with only 2 drives. I have to look more into how RAID actually works for file recovery, for instance one drive might fail or become corrupted years later.