Home Backup Server

[noah_the_tinkererer]

So,

ever since I went to format a USB flash drive and accidentally formatted half a terabyte of useless pictures, games, and music I've been wanting to build a storage server or four for my whole family to use. I want it so each person has their own 10TB hard drive encrypted with their own password so only they can access them and automatic backups for all the devices. I don't know if i should have one sever with four virtual copies of something like FreeNAS or have four separate servers, i would more like to have four separate servers so when the time comes I can move one to another location. On the network I'm looking to backup five iOS devices, three PCs with one running two user accounts, one mac, two android devices, and in the future some Linux Machines. Some cheap hardware suggestions would be highly appreciated since i don't even have a rack yet. Also two of the three PCs and the Mac are wired into the router, everything else is wireless.

Thanks!

[ARikozuM]

I would look into some old Dell tower chassis on Ebay or NZXT Source cases (if you want custom). 

 

I would recommend rackmount Dell R-series with an inexpensive 24-28U rack.

[Shiv78]

Do you really need 10TB per person? Seems like a lot to me

[noah_the_tinkererer]

9 minutes ago, Shiv78 said:

Do you really need 10TB per person? Seems like a lot to me

I want it to be future proof but really not for long. My mom always has to get a larger capacity iPhone for all her photos and everyone else is a hard core gamer.

[kirashi]

9 minutes ago, noah_the_tinkererer said:

I want it to be future proof but really not for long. My mom always has to get a larger capacity iPhone for all her photos and everyone else is a hard core gamer.

Getting 10TB for everyone isn't exactly futureproofing... since, by definition, one cannot futureproof anything. However, I get what you're saying. I'd instead do an analysis to see how much of what data everyone is storing currently. If you have a few gamers, you could actually move everyone's steam libraries to the server and have them load up games over the network. This would save on disk space for everyone, and one wouldn't need to download game updates individually. It would require having a beefy enough network, and probably a couple caching SSD's inside the server in addition to HDD's.

 

Rather than having 4 individual servers, each with 10TB per server and their own OS to manage, I would do the following:

• Analyze who is storing how much of what data, and how often they need to access it
• Build a singular server with 2-3 times as much space as you need now, distributed among multiple hard drives for redundancy
  • Use UnRAID, FreeNAS, or something similar to do this through disk pools. I DO NOT RECOMMEND HARDWARE RAID SOLUTIONS. EVER.
  • Assign user accounts and disk quotas to the accounts via the control panel, and setup a couple of cache SSD's to cache frequently accessed files
  • Install any services you might need, like BitTorrent clients, PLEX, Backup Server Shares (AFP, SMB, SAMBA, etc.)
• Upgrade your network to at least 1GBit locally, if not 10GBit for Steam Library accessing
  • You can often find cheaper used 10Gbit server grade networking gear on eBay
• Build a second server now, or when you can afford it, or just get a managed solution like a Synology or QNAP box
  • Run this as a BACKUP/MIRROR of your functioning UnRAID/FreeNAS server ONLY - think of this as cold archival emergency backup ONLY
  • Store it in another location on site if you have to, but ideally you'd move this to a friends house in another timezone for safety

[ltguy]

10tb per person.... I don't think you have pockets that deep. 

[GW2]

Buy a Synology NAS and be done with it! Shit, buy a QNAP, I don't care. You are over-complicating things in your original post, you would use one server with a share for each user that the others dont have access to. This is true using a full server or a NAS. and ya,

 

10TB per person is INSANE! especially considering you need redundancy. Another thing to remember is that if these people move something from their PC to their share, its not a backup anymore, it's now the original, so how are you backing up this server? You'd be forced into using cloud backup or buying a 4 (or maybe 8) drive RAID enclosure to backup the server to, which costs about as much as a NAS to begin with.