Re: [gentoo-user] NAS suggestions for home user

[Mark Knecht]

On Thu, Sep 30, 2021 at 3:35 PM Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Sep 30, 2021 at 5:50 PM Mark Knecht <markknecht@×××××.com> wrote:
> >
> > I've been looking at a few software solutions based on another thread
here but so far nothing has excited me so recommendations for what makes
sense for high reliability home backup is of great interest, especially if
it helps me somehow in cleaning up the backups after deleting stuff on my
main machine on purpose and therefore not needing it on the backup.
>
> It is probably going to stretch your budget, but you should look into
> distributed filesystems like CephFS/MooseFS/LizardFS.  The latter two
> at least should run fine on hardware like a Pi4 if you aren't doing
> too much IOPS.  You could actually run them on as little as a single
> host, which would probably be cheaper than a commercial NAS though
> really no better.  The big advantages is that you aren't limited by
> the drive capacity of a single host, and you have redundancy at the
> host level.  That is, you can pull a plug on any host and the whole
> thing just keeps running.
>
> Again, I realize this isn't exactly what you asked for.  IMO this is
> the long-term direction storage is trending towards though.  I can't
> vouch for the hardware requirements for Ceph, but that can scale
> incredibly well and is pretty-much the future.  I've heard it isn't so
> great on just a few hosts though.
>
> --
> Rich

Rich,
   The idea of using a Raspberry Pi hadn't entered my mind. I took
a very quick look at CepfFS and immediately felt a bit swamped
but I will look into all the file systems and get back to you if that's ok.

   If the new machine just needs a standard backup plan then IOPS
should be pretty low. If the backup system is low power then I could
just run it Friday afternoons and incremental backups wouldn't be
a problem at all.

   Physically I am sort of looking for a stand along chassis, or that's
the picture in my head anyway. If I can find a Pi4 in a chassis with
power supply and 1-2 drive bays at the right cost that could possibly
make sense for home. The other issue going that way is how much
time do I spend managing the OS on this backup box? Best answer
is zero.

   Thanks for the ideas.

Cheers,
Mark