This will probably be a series of posts, since it will be an ongoing project.

History

So lets start with the history:

• We had a few home computers that needed to share files between them. I considered NAS as an option, but dismissed it at the time for budget and headache reasons. Instead I used an old laptop as home entertainment center.
• That HP laptop lasted until its display dies, then we moved to a WD PowerBook 1TB.
• When that PowerBook died, we already got accustomed to have easy to access network storage, so we upgraded to WD MyCloud 2TB.
• That MyCloud died last week. After it had managed to also get us used to mobile backup.
• So now i am looking for a new replacement.

Requirments

This time I want to make a more informed decision. So I decided to start by looking at what it is I really want.

Data

I have data of several types:

• Documents - those I want backed up for every save, with the ability to revert to any of them. This is something I already have today using SparkleShare with butbucket.org as the backend. This works great except for large files.

• User files - basically this is all the other files in the user space. I want them backup on a regular fassion, but so far I have only had that on the same machine using ZFS snapshots. This is not a good solution, and I want a better solution. SparkleShare was not an option since it contained too much large files (Downloads for example) that I want to be able to remove from the history easily. And will clutter the history of my documents.

• Photos - All the photos we take, using our camera & phones. Up until now I backup up my photos to the network drive, and to a cloud service, glad that i did since that network drive is now dead. But i don’t trust the cloud service to be the only backup either. Also both options where not easy enough for cataloging and organizing unless i sync a local folder with them, something that is simply not possible due to size of the collection.

• Downloads - All apps, drivers, media files, documents, etc. that we download from the world. Those all have limited lifespan, each being downloaded, used for a while and then discarded. They do not need versioning or snapshots, instead they need an origin documentation, easy large storage.

network

Basically I manage today 3 home networks: at my home, my mother and my grandmother. And I also use and sometimes interfere with the networks at my sister and my father-in-law’s.

Up until now my storage solution was limited just to my home network, but i have been thinking for a while on replicating it across those different locations so that i will have access to my files in all those locations, as well as backup.

So whatever solution I will choose eventually, i will want it to be open for replication (probably using torrent sync of incremental snapshots)

Features

So lets review the features required by me for my data and netwrok.

• Capacity: at least 4TB or real storage but I will want to grow it over time. With the overhead for HD redundancy and file overhead - will probably be around 6TB.

• Swap drived: I’ll need the ability to swap drives and continue. Not necesarily a hot swap, I don’t mind shutting down to do it.

• Network connectivity: It will have to be able to connect to my wired ethernet

• NFS/SMB Share.

• UPNP/DLNA Media streaming