I’ve been researching NAS and am figuring out how one can play into my current home setup. There’s a lot I don’t know even after researching. Best I explain to clear things up.

Currently, I have a home server running NextCloud, accessible only via my LAN network. It’s run along with a VPN on a Raspberry Pi 4B running Ubuntu Server. The data is on two 512 GiB external SSD drives. One drive is primary & the other is backup of the primary drive via rsync each day.

I’m looking at a NAS for more backups (Ex. 1 day, 3 days, & 1 week at least) since I have sensitive data on the drives. I want to feel more secure about my home setup with the ability to rollback changes if I mess up something. I also want the NAS to be able to run more services other than just NextCloud eventually, like Grocy/KitchenOwl, etc.

I have some more questions about NAS given my info:

  • Do I have to use a special NAS-specific OS to make use of the NAS hardware? Like to do snapshots and stuff?
  • Kinda related: what if I install something like Debian/Ubuntu on it? Can I still use the NAS hardware in the same way?

I looked into some solutions like TrueNAS and Synology. I prefer an OS that’s free software so I have control over what I’m doing and not held hostage if they want to increase prices, force upgrades, enshittify things, etc.

  • @TCB13English
    4•10 months ago

    Kinda related: what if I install something like Debian/Ubuntu on it? Can I still use the NAS hardware in the same way?

    And that’s what you should do because those NAS specific software is more overhead than solution. You can setup the entire thing manually use less resources and have it better. BTRFS is a good solution when it comes do a simple RAID.

    To be fair for a basic NAS what you need is Samba 4 for shares and something like FileBrowser for a WebUI. Another suggestion I’ve for you is to really go Debian and use LXD/Incus to create containers and virtual machines if required. I’ve posted about it here.