this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2025
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Hello all! As the title suggests, I'm looking for some help and recommendations for starting a NAS storage/backup between a few households in my family.

Apologies if this isn't the right place to ask this. This will be my first entry into something something like this, so I'm not entirely sure where to go.

What I would like to do is have an enclosure in each house and have them all sync together. Two drives will be necessary since I'll use one drive just on my own since I have a lot of files to store. The other drive I would like to partition so that each household can be given a set amount of storage.

The rest of my family isn't very tech savvy, so I would prefer a solution that is relatively straight forward to setup and troubleshoot in the rare case I might need them to do something remotely.

I would like to keep the price of the enclosure reasonable since the rest of my family is pitching in on the costs.

Some extra info I copied from one of my comments:

  • At this point, will have 2 houses, but likely 3 by next year.
  • The first two will be a short drive away, but the third will be hours away.
  • The houses are on 100/50Mb fiber. Very stable internet.
  • Me being the tech person, I'll access them every way that's available. For the rest of my family I'll likely set them up either with a hardwire or local network.
  • We will be using them as part of a 3-2-1 backup for all of our files like photos or documents. I'll be using the second drive for occasional video backup storage.
  • The shared drive will probably be 5-10 TB, depending on how much storage each household wants. The second drive for me will be around 20TB.
  • We want multiple units so we have multiple copies of all our important files in the event of something like a house burning down.

Another clarification:

We do want to access files from each NAS individually instead of having everyone connect to one master NAS. The storage will be used mainly for archival and backup, so version conflicts of individual files wont be much of a concern.

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[–] Bubs@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

There will probably be several pools. Each household will get a private pool. Then there will be a shared pool for stuff like family photos. Finally I'll have the second drive as my own pool. So there will be 4-5 pools on the small drive.

Each NAS will be identical so all data is mirrored to each one. That way if a NAS dies or something worse happens like a house burning down, we won't lose any files.

[–] InnerScientist@lemmy.world 2 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

A mirror isn't a full backup, are you sure you don't want to use something like restic?
If someone deletes a file it's gone, if a virus overwrites it good luck.

You didn't specify if your pool should be a distributed one or one individual pool per nas.