Home computer storage/backup

[TRD270]

Okay so I used to consider myself fairly tech savvy but i'm not hip with the times anymore. My machines are getting older and I have crap spread across numerous external hard drives and i'm worried about losing the data. Since all of my photos, videos, documents are all electronic now it's time to get serious about a central storage platform. I know a number of you guys are pretty techie so looking for some insight.

I'd really like the comfort of having my stuff backed up on a raid system for redundancy and i've been reading up on network attached storage. Its a little pricey for me at the moment but I really like the idea and convenience. Especially after discovering my lesson plans from flight instruction have disappeared to narnia, 3 months of every waking moment of my free time gone.

I'd like the ability to back up my laptop, desktop, phones etc etc all in one place and as streamlined as possible. I have both Mac OS and Windows machines.

Looking at something like this

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087ZCBWFH/?tag=thewire06-20&linkCode=xm2&ascsubtag=AwEAAAAAAAAAAevD

Love to hear your ideas/thoughts and what hardware/solutions you guys are using

 

[N-Smooth]

following...

 

[Stephen]

Here's what I did this fall:
TerraMaster F2-210 2-Bay NAS. Simple, basic NAS that was real easy to set up and configure.
Then I bought two Western Digital Easystore 8TB External Drives. These go on sale all the time at Amazon, Newegg, and Bestbuy. Look around for the best price, even check for the larger ones too, they may be cheaper now. These have unlabeled WD Red server grade drives in them, so I shucked the drives and put them in the NAS. All together I now have a pretty solid RAID'ed NAS and I spent less that $500.

 

[Spork]

Here's what I did this fall:
TerraMaster F2-210 2-Bay NAS. Simple, basic NAS that was real easy to set up and configure.
Then I bought two Western Digital Easystore 8TB External Drives. These go on sale all the time at Amazon, Newegg, and Bestbuy. Look around for the best price, even check for the larger ones too, they may be cheaper now. These have unlabeled WD Red server grade drives in them, so I shucked the drives and put them in the NAS. All together I now have a pretty solid RAID'ed NAS and I spent less that $500.

I think that's the same one I got. I ended up with smaller drives (4G drives) but it's been a couple years since I did mine.

 

[Corban_White]

I've gone through this debate with myself for years and finally this year decided to pay for some cloud storage. We deal with a lot of hard drive backups at work and it actually takes a fair amount of maintenance. I decided I didn't want to deal with the cost and time to do it on my own, so I traded that for a yearly fee. After a fair amount of research, I went with https://www.idrive.com/. I found a discount link and got the first year for under $5. Next year it will cost me ~$60. So far it is going fine but I can't really review it yet because I haven't even finished getting all the computers backing up to it yet.

 

[mbryson]

Cloud storage for me. I buy the MS Office 365 and it comes with 1 Tb of storage. I just use that. I can also spread my O365 license between 5 machines within my home as well. $10 per month? I don't have any love for MS but use Office enough it's worth it to me. I just try to maximize my investment in it.

I can access my OneDrive from whatever browser/device I'm using. I can even edit docs and such through a browser (I'm SURE that MS is headed to browser based Office in the next few years)

 

[TRD270]

So for the cloud based guys. Ever worry about whatever service getting in a pissing match with whomever operates the servers and pulling the plug. Only think about the recent scenario with Parler? While the scenario seems unlikely, I trust a physical copy in my house. The downside to only a physical copy in my house is I guess some sort of disaster where my drives are destroyed.

 

[Corban_White]

So for the cloud based guys. Ever worry about whatever service getting in a pissing match with whomever operates the servers and pulling the plug. Only think about the recent scenario with Parler? While the scenario seems unlikely, I trust a physical copy in my house. The downside to only a physical copy in my house is I guess some sort of disaster where my drives are destroyed.

With the way I have iDrive setup I have a local copy of everything on each computer, then I backup whatever I want and I also sync some things between computers and the cloud, also keeping all data on all devices so it is available offline. So as long as my computers don't burn down at the same time as the hosting decides to screw me, I should be good.

 

[frieed]

I built up a NAS box with an old motherboard loaded with FreeNAS OS (linux NAS specific distro) running two 4TB drives in a raid 1 config.

 

[TRD270]

I built up a NAS box with an old motherboard loaded with FreeNAS OS (linux NAS specific distro) running two 4TB drives in a raid 1 config.

I have my current raid storage on an old machine, i'll have to look at turning it into an NAS. Though that machine is part of the reason I want to get something new. It's like an old car, when I hit the button I wonder if its going to start this time or not.

 

[mbryson]

So for the cloud based guys. Ever worry about whatever service getting in a pissing match with whomever operates the servers and pulling the plug. Only think about the recent scenario with Parler? While the scenario seems unlikely, I trust a physical copy in my house. The downside to only a physical copy in my house is I guess some sort of disaster where my drives are destroyed.

With the way I have iDrive setup I have a local copy of everything on each computer, then I backup whatever I want and I also sync some things between computers and the cloud, also keeping all data on all devices so it is available offline. So as long as my computers don't burn down at the same time as the hosting decides to screw me, I should be good.

I still keep a local copy on my "main" computer (that's WAY older than @UNSTUCK's laptop we were talking about the other day) that I should look into updating. I have also kept things on an external drive but I've really fallen out of that habit

 

[shortstraw8]

If you know linux, you can setup and old computer as your own media storage with owncloud.
Cross platform and if you have a router with port forwarding capabilities you can easily access it from outside your home.

Plex is also something you can run alongside on the same machine for movies, it does photos and music too. I split mine into VMs (working on getting everything containerized now) I like letting plex handle video and music, the rest I use owncloud for.
I would suggest a drive big enough to fit your data compressed. Keep that drive somewhere safe, as a fail safe "Im an idiot and did something wrong and now my s**ts all gone".