For a while now my online footprint has increased with my photos and videos back up to Google Photos, my website backed up to some cloud storage and my laptop uploaded to Dropbox. This is all good until you fill the storage or the companies restrict storage or start to ask you to pay for extra storage.
My solution to this is to run my own home server which can store all of my media and then back up to a Cloud service. This also gives me the added advantage of being able to run multiple apps which gives me a lot of flexibility over what services I can run at home.
Out of box or home made NAS?
Now I’ve decided that the time is right to have my own NAS (Network attached storage) at home it comes down to deciding if I should go for a out of box or a home made NAS. Since I was on a budget I decided I would go for a home made NAS box and this would give me the added bonus of choosing my own hardware and software.
Hardware
I decided that I wanted a relativity cheap to run server which wouldn’t cost must for electricity especially with the energy costs rising so much. For NAS box I don’t need a powerful CPU which means I can go for something with enough grunt to run some apps and my website.
- HP ProLiant MicroServer
- Intel® Celeron® Processor G1610T 2.30 GHz
- 16GB DDR3 RAM
- 1x 500GB SSD for boot drive
- 2x 2TB drives
- 2x empty drives bays for expansion
- HP iLO (Integrated Lights-Out) – this allows me to remotely manage the server even from boot
Drives are non hot swappable but this isn’t an issue since its for home use and I’m happy to just shut down and swap over drives with a couple of minutes downtime.
TrueNAS Core or Scale?
My next decision was what software to run on my server and what version of that software. When it comes to free NAS software you can’t get much better than TrueNAS (aka freenas). There is two different releases to choose from which is TrueNAS Core or Scale which very much depended on what I wanted to run and how bleeding edge I want to be. At the time of posting Core was a fully fledged product with such a bit following whereas Scale had a stable release but hadn’t been out long. I decided that I wanted to be able to run VMs (for my website) as well as run some apps like Plex and Navidrome which led me to go for Scale since both VMs and apps are easier to manage.
Backups
Even though the point of using raid is that you have redundancy and less downtime if a drive fails its also recommended to take backups. There wasn’t even a second thought when I for remote cloud backups over local. With the amount of data churn I was expecting it wasnt going to strain my broadband bandwidth and if I had a randsom attack I could be safe in knowing that I had an off site backup.
There is a whole bunch of cloud backup services out there and looking at cost, recovery time and availability I went for Wasabi. At the time of posting they were about £6 per TB/month with no fees for egress or API requests. While testing out their free trial I found that I could easily max out my upload bandwidth so had to limit my backup speed so that I don’t have slowness of my website and other services.
Finally
I’m going to write up some more detailed posts of how I setup my home network, TrueNAS and my backups. If you want to replicate my setup please give it a go and post an questions/issues you come across.