alt Hacker NewsIts the maintenance and details that kill your NAS.
You will probably rely on it for 10 years at least, so building your NAS means committing to maintaining it in the long term, you have to be sure this is something you will uphold.
Also while setting up your NAS initially is definitely doable, there are a trillion little things to get right and make sure won't bite you later on (scrubble, etc).
All these things compounds if the NAS is not just for you, but your wife, kids, family, etc. Now it becomes your responsibility that all these precious data and photos entrusted to you are 100% safe for the decades to come.
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As some kind of cosmic karma for making my smug comment, one of my metadata mirror vdevs died this morning while my wife was doing a big transfer.
Most have developed abstractions to reduce platform and service specific dependency:
https://github.com/rclone/rclone
From a maintenance perspective, one must not assume a NAS is a backup, but rather a high-bandwidth local/VPN file share.
* maids unplug equipment to vacuum offices (yes, this does really happen.)
* drives fail eventually, bit-rot is a thing, and filesystems evolve over time
* hardware specific features will always become a problem eventually. No one will check a degraded RAID/ZFS setup without service telemetry.
Practical options:
* sshfs + JBOD mount is fine for most home win11/bsd/linux/macOS/iOS/android users, as simple things have less failure modes and less time-cost to repair.
* fault tolerant systems like CephFS are usually too complex for home users. However, https://www.45drives.com offers a support option for small offices.
* ZFS has a lot of tradeoffs, and most people don't use the better key features (auto-snap-shotting and docker/VM deduplication.) In some cases even F2FS will also work fine, and probably last a bit longer with consumer flash drives.
* I agree the IT support issue with distros like TrueNAS or openmediavault becomes a popularity contest over what features are supported long-term.
It is often better to use a generic OpenBSD or Debian OS installation, and run the rclone network share abstractions on PC/Mac clients. Android and iPhone both have sftp clients for auto media backups over router VPN as well..
Lightning always wins every argument, an offsite VPN to remote file-backup is usually wise. =3
> All these things compounds if the NAS is not just for you, but your wife, kids, family, etc. Now it becomes your responsibility that all these precious data and photos entrusted to you are 100% safe for the decades to come.
A NAS is not a backup? It's hot storage.
I have a NAS but I backup my photos on AWS in S3 Deep Glacier. It costs me less than $1 a month for 500GB of pictures. That's a backup.
But are these off-the-shelf solutions actually supported for ten years? And since they're usually bought for "easy remote connectivity" and whatnot, that's rather important. Bonus points for updates typically being installed automatically, so people won't even think to check whether it's still updated or not.
I have a NAS made from a 15-year-old computer, with standard parts. It can saturate a gigabit link over WireGuard, so it's good enough for my needs. I installed the latest Linux kernel on it the other day. And it doesn't have random unknown stuff calling home. Since it runs ZFS and scrubs regularly, I'm quite confident the data on it is still in good shape.