[ale] DIY NAS vs Boxed NAS?

[Chris Fowler]

Maybe too late to give you a decent reply. 

I have two concerns with backups. 

1. Theft 
2. Hardware failure. 

#1 gives me the most anxiety when I travel or we are on vacation. 

One way I have solved this is with a Ctera backup appliance that has cloud sync and ranking of my on data by value to tag for that sync. I did not have equivalent cloud storage as I had within the NAS. High value data was replicated to their storage system. 

The 2nd way was with NextCloud on a VM at Digital Ocean. It still solves both, but because I'm using 100% VM at DO I don't have the storage space I would have with a NAS. 

The newer version of NextCloud works very well. The Android app works and on Linux I'm using Webdav to sync. I also use Dropbox. 

My final redundant safe guard for #1 is that I rsync to an encrypted USB stick that goes on my keychain. I also rsync the Nextcloud and Dropbox to that. I also have a 4T passport drive that is encrypted that I backup to and can take with me when I travel. 

I believe most people only design their backup to focus on #2. I had a friend whose truck was broken into in Atlanta and they took everything. He had no cloud backup. 

Whatever you use, make sure there is a way for it to do some sort of cloud backup. If you use a box NAS make sure it supports rsync clients connecting (preferably via SSH). It be nice if you could schedule rsync on it. The Ctera allowed me to do both. If you make a NextCloud appliance you'll have root access to the Linux underneath and you can do any type of backup you want. Three years ago when I played with NC on a Beaglebone Black The underlying storage was really a Webdav share from box.com. A bit odd, but that allowed me to use the NC in house with 100% cloud backup. I was also just having fun with it. 

I've recently been using NC at DO to test eventual replacement of my use of Dropbox. It'd be nice if I could get a VM at one of these providers with access to 1T of space. Rackspace and DigitalOcean tie storage space to CPU/mem. Hard to scale only one of those. 

> From: "Alex Carver via Ale" <ale at ale.org>
> To: "Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts" <ale at ale.org>
> Sent: Friday, November 30, 2018 3:26:19 PM
> Subject: [ale] DIY NAS vs Boxed NAS?

> I'm making a plan for some major network and hardware updates over the
> next year at home. One of the things on the list has been a large-ish
> NAS box for storing backup images of the various computers, recording
> video from IP security cameras, and possibly just having a small shared
> area for files that need to be shared among multiple computers and users.

> Given the proliferation of various boxed NAS devices like Synology,
> QNAP, etc. I wanted to find out what other people would consider doing,
> whether they'd just get a boxed device or put together one from a
> motherboard, some SATA cards and a case.

> One other thing: what file system would you put on top of the array?
> EXT4, Brtfs, something else?
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