I’m thinking of backing all of my family’s digital assets up. It includes less than 4 TB of information. Most are redundant video files that are in old encodings or not encoded at all and there are a lot of duplicate images and old documents. I’m gonna clean this stuff up with a bash script and some good old manual review, but first I need to do some pre-planning.
- What’s the cheapest and most flexible NAS I can make from eBay or local? What kind of processors and what motherboard features?
- What separate guides should I follow to source the drives? What RAID?
- What backup style should I follow? How many cold copies? How do I even handle the event of a fire?
I intend to do some of this research on my own since no one answer is fully representative but am appreciative of any leads.
4 TB isn’t that much data. Do you even need a NAS, if you’re not planning on serving the media? If you have a desktop PC, just stick a 4 TB drive or two in there, and keep an offsite copy either by cloud backup or external drive at someone else’s house (or bank safe deposit box if you want to be really sure).
I prefer keeping drives like this external so I can turn them off when I’m not using them. No need having the disks spin up just because my machine woke from sleep or something decided to access it. Plus should you get some malware on your computer if the disk wasn’t turned on it shouldn’t be affected.