Think about it carefully

Make sure you do not hurt anyone

…do not hurt yourself

wait for the right time

against all feelings, wait

and then, at the right time

let it all out

on everyone

on everything

just out

free

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

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