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Suggestions for NAS (or other hardware) solution to home setup (lemmy.wtf)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've been researching NAS and am figuring out how one can play into my current home setup. There's a lot I don't know even after researching. Best I explain to clear things up.

Currently, I have a home server running NextCloud, accessible only via my LAN network. It's run along with a VPN on a Raspberry Pi 4B running Ubuntu Server. The data is on two 512 GiB external SSD drives. One drive is primary & the other is backup of the primary drive via rsync each day.

I'm looking at a NAS for more backups (Ex. 1 day, 3 days, & 1 week at least) since I have sensitive data on the drives. I want to feel more secure about my home setup with the ability to rollback changes if I mess up something. I also want the NAS to be able to run more services other than just NextCloud eventually, like Grocy/KitchenOwl, etc.

I have some more questions about NAS given my info:

Do I have to use a special NAS-specific OS to make use of the NAS hardware? Like to do snapshots and stuff?
Kinda related: what if I install something like Debian/Ubuntu on it? Can I still use the NAS hardware in the same way?

I looked into some solutions like TrueNAS and Synology. I prefer an OS that's free software so I have control over what I'm doing and not held hostage if they want to increase prices, force upgrades, enshittify things, etc.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Do I have to use a special NAS-specific OS to make use of the NAS hardware? Like to do snapshots and stuff?

No, these features are provided by various components, which are available in any modern OS. Snapshots for example can be provided by LVM or ZFS. Disk fault tolerance (RAID) is typically provided by LVM-RAID, ZFS, or plain old mdadm, or a hardware RAID card.

Kinda related: what if I install something like Debian/Ubuntu on it? Can I still use the NAS hardware in the same way?

You can, provided you set up these components yourself. Pre-made NAS OS like OpenMediaVault or TrueNAS will have these set up out-of-the-box. Web-based configuration interfaces are often specific to these pre-made distributions, so if a Web UI is a must-have, you will have to find suitable alternatives (for example cockpit, web-based file managers, web-based user management tools, etc)