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I live in a downtown condo. After I got fed up with 4-bay Synology - noise and proprietary everything, I copied all the data to a single 4TB WD passport and bou

I live in a downtown condo. After I got fed up with 4-bay Synology - noise and proprietary everything, I copied all the data to a single 4TB WD passport and bought a fanless mini-itx on AliExpress and installed Ubuntu on it and few services, mainly in docker containers. I understand it is a shoddy setup so all important data has reserve copies and offsite backups but in terms of form factor - that was the right decision for me.

syntaxing 6y ago
Super interested in this setup! Is it possible to provide some links?
- mynegation 6y ago
  I bought from https://www.hystou.com/ https://www.hystou.com/ not affiliated, bought after the recommendation from a friend). Cannot link to the specific model because they continually update them and it was few years ago, but you can check their Fanless PCs lineup. I do not have a detailed write up of a setup but shortly: it the latest LTS, installed on built in SSD and attached USB disk is for bulk data - 4TB WD Passport. All important data are stored in encfs over Dropbox so - saves in a cloud continuously and encrypted. Once a month I swap one of the two secondary USB drives and a custom script does a combination of rdiff backups and encrypted zips and the disk is stored offsite. Hopefully one day I will move that script to borg. Dockers run a bunch of random stuff like tt-rss and airsonic music server where I store a bunch of old and obscure stuff not available on Spotify.
neodymiumphish 6y ago
If you're comfortable with Docker but want a great modular experience, I highly suggest UnRAID (unraid.net). Obviously, you're likely good with your situation, but anyone else looking for a similar alternative to the proprietary NAS solutions should definitely look into UnRAID. I've got it hosting a web server with a ton of different services on a 2700X with 4 6TB and 1 4TB drive. Excellent software and really great community support.
- mynegation 6y ago
  Thank you for recommendation! I think I looked at Unraid and other options like FreeNAS and Proxmox etc, but from what I understand - the main value add of Unraid is presenting multiple HDDs as a single volume and with a single data drive (1) it does not make much sense (2) I specifically wanted to be able to stick the drive into another computer, and mount its ext3 file system and go, that came in handy few times. As for the amount of data - I went full Marie Kondo on my old datasets and now my backup set is well under 2TB.

syntaxing 6y ago

Super interested in this setup! Is it possible to provide some links?

mynegation 6y ago
I bought from https://www.hystou.com/ https://www.hystou.com/ not affiliated, bought after the recommendation from a friend). Cannot link to the specific model because they continually update them and it was few years ago, but you can check their Fanless PCs lineup. I do not have a detailed write up of a setup but shortly: it the latest LTS, installed on built in SSD and attached USB disk is for bulk data - 4TB WD Passport. All important data are stored in encfs over Dropbox so - saves in a cloud continuously and encrypted. Once a month I swap one of the two secondary USB drives and a custom script does a combination of rdiff backups and encrypted zips and the disk is stored offsite. Hopefully one day I will move that script to borg. Dockers run a bunch of random stuff like tt-rss and airsonic music server where I store a bunch of old and obscure stuff not available on Spotify.

neodymiumphish 6y ago

If you're comfortable with Docker but want a great modular experience, I highly suggest UnRAID (unraid.net). Obviously, you're likely good with your situation, but anyone else looking for a similar alternative to the proprietary NAS solutions should definitely look into UnRAID. I've got it hosting a web server with a ton of different services on a 2700X with 4 6TB and 1 4TB drive. Excellent software and really great community support.

mynegation 6y ago
Thank you for recommendation! I think I looked at Unraid and other options like FreeNAS and Proxmox etc, but from what I understand - the main value add of Unraid is presenting multiple HDDs as a single volume and with a single data drive (1) it does not make much sense (2) I specifically wanted to be able to stick the drive into another computer, and mount its ext3 file system and go, that came in handy few times. As for the amount of data - I went full Marie Kondo on my old datasets and now my backup set is well under 2TB.