Good afternoon all, I have half-assed my backups for 15 years, and it is not sustainable, and I need your help! I have the following setup: 1x Raspberry Pi 4 with a WD USB3 MyBook 4TB as a NAS target using OpenMediaVault. This works well enough, but is not in my mind a long term viable solution. 1x Apple Airport TimeCapsule A1355 2TB

I also have a smattering of other drives collected from over the years in MyBooks, all USB 2.0 drives, a 2TB mirror edition (2x 1TB drives in RAID 0 or RAID1), 1TB, and 500GB. This does not include the random 750 GBs, 500 GB and old 250 GB drives that I’ve taken out of my Macs and PCs over the years as I’ve upgraded them. I’ve got files scattered everywhere on them, plus on my MacBook and several other PCs and Macs around the house.

I need some help consolidating this into a single solution with priority to my photos and family home videos for data integrity. Then to a lesser extent, maybe PC backups and file storage.

Currently all of my photos are backed up to Google Photos or Amazon photos. With the fact that neither google or amazon is to be trusted with my photos, I’m ok with dumping them. Web based backup solutions are iffy, it takes forever for a backup to complete, as I am on a 60megabit download, with about a 5megabit upload connection. According to some things I’ve seen advertised nearby, fiber is being ran throughout the area, but it may be a year or two before it comes to my neighborhood.

For other hardware I have laying about, I have a 1st gen i7 980x system that is idle nowadays and is full of low capacity drives by today’s standards, a 2008 MacBook, the above mentioned 2012 MacBook Pro, an Atom n450 netbook, and an AMD Ryzen 5700g based prebuilt. None of them really seem to be something that would be useful as a ZFS based NAS or anything. But is a ZFS NAS or BTRFS system something that I need, or would my needs be better met by something else?

I have also looked at an OWC Mercurydisk M-Disc compatible burner for photo and video backup.

What are some options to look into? Preference would be on not breaking the bank and not necessarily set and forget it, but something I haven’t got to fight with to keep running.