The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/Timon2pc on 2025-02-11 12:33:02.

Hello there,

I’d appreciate some advice on how to organize my storage in the NAS I’m planning to build in the following days. I’m a complete noob in the field and did some reading which led me to the following assumptions. I’d like you to check them for me and see if they are true, or else please correct my mistakes:

  1. NAS purpose: to store important family photos and media and act as a cloud service for the family to upload photos from their phones etc.
  2. This NAS will be built from an old Dell server PC with ECC RAM I bought from ebay and will be backed up regularly on a separate PC HDD dedicated for the backup job only. The second PC (Dell m910q with USB external enclosure for thehard drive) will be a Linux machine, but for the purpose of this backup is it necessary to go for a Linux distro with btrfs file sustem, or ext4 should be equally fine?
  3. What is the best type of connection between those two PCs for this job? Network over wifi, USB, other?
  4. What’s the most reliable and easy application for this back up? Pika/Borg, rsync via GUI(I’m not confident with the terminal and command line, cannot write scripts for planned jobs etc), other?
  5. Both NAS and it’s backup “slave” PC will NOT be running any other VMs, or other softwares for me to play and learn. There is another PC for these jobs. A cloud service will have the remote (off site) backup of the absolutely not recoverable data/photos(less than 1TB currently ) I need to preserve. When I become more confident with the current NAS, the next step is to build a second small one at my parents place for a second off site backup (3-2-1 rule sort of)
  6. Truenas scale is my choice for the NAS OS because I want to exploit the benefits of the zfs file system and pay the maximum attention to data safety and integrity. Avoid data rot as much as possible.
  7. I’m planning to start with two 8TB NAS quality (CMR) hard drives in a mirror configuration. The data I have backed up so far in another device are roughly 3.5 TB and would not grow by more than 200-400GB per year I would expect. Will this rate of expansion be covered reliably for say another 5 years by the 8TB total storage I will have in my planned configuration? What is the optimal percentage of storage you would use in a NAS type of HDD in a zfs system? Would you go as high as 90%?
  8. I understand that in truenas is very difficult currently to add new HDD in your existing pool of data if you want to expand your storage in the future. Would it be wiser then to start straight with 3,4, or 5 hard drives and what would be the raid configuration that would give the max protection for data rot - raid 6 or 10?
  9. My budget for hdd is very limited currently and cannot spend more than $300. Is it safe to buy used NAS disks for my low demand system (not many users, very little traffic of data daily, no 24/7 service, probably working mainly in the evenings) if I am going for a pool with more than 2 drives?
  10. I have a single 4TB SMR 3.5" type of HDD. Is this a reliable solution for backups with the help of a USB enclosure? It would be stored in a drawer in my parents place and used only periodically to store some incremental type of backups.

Thanks for getting the time to read all this and for your help.