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To me, a real NAS box means: - ECC RAM, to avoid corruption on write - Software RAID, to avoid data loss due to drive failure - Some kind of checksumming and

To me, a real NAS box means: - ECC RAM, to avoid corruption on write - Software RAID, to avoid data loss due to drive failure - Some kind of checksumming and error-correcting filesystem, e.g. ZFS, to prevent data loss due to bad sectors - Enough CPU to transcode media in real-time - Vanilla distro with SSH, SMB filesharing, Plex, and networked printing - A spare PSU in the closet I explicitly avoid: - Hardware RAID (unnecessary, expensive, harder to fix) - Any OEM prebuilt NAS products (more expensive, less capable, less user control) - Any specialty NAS-oriented distros or OSes (more feature bloat, bigger attack surfaces) I use plain old Debian for my home NAS. I'd switch to OpenBSD in a heartbeat if it supported a checksumming and error-correcting filesystem.

nottorp 5y ago
> Software RAID, to avoid data loss due to drive failure Ok it's old but: raid is not backup. I've personally worked for a small online shop that was selling digital items and shut down when their raid failed. Of course, they had ignored my warnings to build a mirror system or do copies on removable drives or ... anything resembling an actual backup. Edit: that said, I do have a box that's pretty similar to what you're describing.
- neartheplain 5y ago
  Yes, for actual backups I have M-DISC BluRays [0] which I keep in a fireproof box. They're limited in capacity compared to the full NAS, but big enough for really important stuff like photos and scanned documents (which conveniently are intrinsically write-once). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
  - khimaros 5y ago
    encrypted, deduplicated offsite backups are another approach. borgbackup on free tier cloud services can be useful for this.
    - syntheticnature 5y ago
      Serious question: are there free tier cloud services with enough storage to be worthwhile?
      - justin_oaks 5y ago
        It probably depends on how much you need to store. But if you need ongoing backup that will get larger and larger then the answer is probably "No". I back up my family photos and other important files to Amazon S3 using Restic. My 150GB of data ends up costing me about $1.50/month. I could get the price down lower if I use, say, the Infrequent Access storage tier, but at that price point I just can't be bothered to deal with it. A free tier often isn't worth it if you have to put any time into thinking about whether you'll exceed the limit. I'd just go with a cheap pay-as-you-go service and not worry about it.
Miraste 5y ago
> Any specialty NAS-oriented distros or OSes (more feature bloat, bigger attack surfaces) So you recommend ZFS but not TrueNAS? It more or less is FreeBSD with zfs and NAS-oriented defaults+utils. There's not much I'd count as bloat.

nottorp 5y ago

> Software RAID, to avoid data loss due to drive failure Ok it's old but: raid is not backup. I've personally worked for a small online shop that was selling digital items and shut down when their raid failed. Of course, they had ignored my warnings to build a mirror system or do copies on removable drives or ... anything resembling an actual backup. Edit: that said, I do have a box that's pretty similar to what you're describing.

neartheplain 5y ago
Yes, for actual backups I have M-DISC BluRays [0] which I keep in a fireproof box. They're limited in capacity compared to the full NAS, but big enough for really important stuff like photos and scanned documents (which conveniently are intrinsically write-once). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
- khimaros 5y ago
  encrypted, deduplicated offsite backups are another approach. borgbackup on free tier cloud services can be useful for this.
  - syntheticnature 5y ago
    Serious question: are there free tier cloud services with enough storage to be worthwhile?
    - justin_oaks 5y ago
      It probably depends on how much you need to store. But if you need ongoing backup that will get larger and larger then the answer is probably "No". I back up my family photos and other important files to Amazon S3 using Restic. My 150GB of data ends up costing me about $1.50/month. I could get the price down lower if I use, say, the Infrequent Access storage tier, but at that price point I just can't be bothered to deal with it. A free tier often isn't worth it if you have to put any time into thinking about whether you'll exceed the limit. I'd just go with a cheap pay-as-you-go service and not worry about it.

Miraste 5y ago

> Any specialty NAS-oriented distros or OSes (more feature bloat, bigger attack surfaces) So you recommend ZFS but not TrueNAS? It more or less is FreeBSD with zfs and NAS-oriented defaults+utils. There's not much I'd count as bloat.