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The Cheapest NAS

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Re: The Cheapest NAS

#61

Post by barnabee »

vunderba wrote: post #44
Dylan16807 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS, GCP, and Azure all offer cold storage for about $1 per TB per month. If you want any cheaper you need to build a second NAS. You could also take the awkward route and add one or two large drives to your desktop, mirror there, and back that up to backblaze (not B2). The other suggestions you got for hot storage strike me as the wrong way to handle this, if you're considering $80 per year per TB for backups then j…

For the OP - be careful with AWS, the closest pricing to one dollar per terabyte is S3 Glacier Deep Archive and you'd be surprised how expensive a full restore can be in the event that you need to do so in terms of restore pricing, egress cost, etc. Another NAS isn't really a good solution (unless you can place it in a different house) - the goal of a cloud back up is that it's offsite.

I use Glacier alongside RAID with 4 drives so that I can recover from any single drive failure (which will happen) just by swapping in a new drive.

Had this setup ~10 years and have had to replace a drive on two occasions but never needed to restore from Glacier.

At this point even if I do need to do a Glacier restore one day it’s still going to work out to be pretty economical.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#62

Post by jjrh »

criddell wrote: post #43
jnovek wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so make sure to have backups Can you (or someone) suggest a backup scheme? I have a 28TB NAS. Almost everything I've looked into is expensive or intended more for enterprise tier. Are there options for backup in the "hobbyist" price range?

The low-tech and not super resilient method is to buy a second 28TB NAS, put it in a different location and sync them periodically when you know your primary is in good shape. Back in the days of DVDs, I used to backup my 20GB drive onto DVDs. I wonder if you could do something similar today but instead of a bunch of 4GB optical disks, you would use 4 x 8TB drives?

There is 'amanda'. It will split your data up if and you can rotate a bunch of disks.

Used it years ago, we rotated disks every week or something and periodically would take one out of commission and get a new one.

I believe you can mix and match storage mediums - like have your monthly snapshot write to tape.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#63

Post by ahofmann »

frutiger wrote: post #53
jnovek wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so make sure to have backups Can you (or someone) suggest a backup scheme? I have a 28TB NAS. Almost everything I've looked into is expensive or intended more for enterprise tier. Are there options for backup in the "hobbyist" price range?

`zfs send --raw` of encrypted datasets to https://www.rsync.net/products/zfsintro.html .

That would cost at least 336 € per month.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#64

Post by ssl-3 »

jstanley wrote: post #4

When people set up these NAS's, how are they accessing the files? NFS? SFTP? And how are you accessing it when away from home? A VPN that you're permanently connected to? Is there a good way to do NAT hole-punching? Syncthing kind of does what I want, in that it lets all my computers sync the same files no matter what network they're on, but it insists on always copying all the files ("syncing") whereas I just want t…

I use Syncthing to synchronize my smaller datasets between my laptop, my phone, and my NAS. This covers all of my productive and creative scenarios.

On the LAN, I just use SMB. It is adequate for my needs.

For remotely accessing my collection of Linux ISOs, I use Plex.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#65

Post by EvanAnderson »

coconut08 wrote: post #52
EvanAnderson wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you've verified hashes of your files over time you may be having problems and not realizing it.

i've heard people say this, like i said, since before i started using zfs and i've never had an issue with a corrupted file. there's a few things that could be happening: i'm the luckiest person who has ever lived, these bit flip events don't happen nearly as often as people like to pretend they do, or when they do happen they aren't likely to be a big deal.

I have some JPEGs with bit flips. I could tell because they display ugly artifacts at the point of the bit flip. (You can see the kind of artifacts I'm talking about here: https://xn--andreasvlker-cjb.de/2024/02/28/image-formats-bit...)

I'd happened to archive the files to CD-R's incidentally. I was able to compare those archived files to the ones that remained on my file server. There were bit flips randomly in some of the files.

After that happened I started hashing all of my files and comparing hashes when I migrate files during server upgrades. Prior to using ZFS I also periodically verified file hashes with a cheapo Perl script.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#66

Post by barnabee »

eric__cartman wrote: post #39
hitsurume wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know ECC is a special type of ram, but how does it help a NAS/Raid setup?

If you're unlucky enough to experience memory errors in one of the intermediate buffers files go through while being copied from one computer to another an incorrect copy of the file might get written to disk. When running software RAID, memory errors could also cause data to be replicated erroneously and raise an error the next time it's read. That said if the memory is flaky enough that these errors are common it's…

I wonder whether something like Syncthing would notice a hash difference with data corruption caused by such a memory error? And whether it’d correct it or propagate the issue…

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#67

Post by jjav »

theshrike79 wrote: post #32
Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #3

Note that it doesn't look like it has ECC, so make sure to have backups. Fancy file systems like ZFS don't remove the need for ECC.

I've had non-ECC NAS systems for over 20 years and I've had exactly zero cases where memory corruption was an issue. It's OK for corporate systems, but complete overkill for personal setups.

> It's OK for corporate systems, but complete overkill for personal setups.

My personal files are ultimately a lot more important to me and much more irreplaceable than any files at work.

I'd never run a NAS without ZFS and ECC.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#68

Post by iforgotpassword »

coconut08 wrote: post #52
EvanAnderson wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you've verified hashes of your files over time you may be having problems and not realizing it.

i've heard people say this, like i said, since before i started using zfs and i've never had an issue with a corrupted file. there's a few things that could be happening: i'm the luckiest person who has ever lived, these bit flip events don't happen nearly as often as people like to pretend they do, or when they do happen they aren't likely to be a big deal.

If all you have on your Nas is pirated movies, then yes

> when they do happen they aren't likely to be a big deal.

But with more sensitive data it might matter to you. Ram can go bad like hdds can, and without ecc you have no chance of telling. Zfs won't help you here if the bit flip happens in the page cache. The file will corrupt in ram and Zfs will happily calculate a checksum for that corrupted data and store that alongside the file.

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#69

Post by pwg »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #24

Is there any NAS software that just lets you add disks whenever you want, while using them for redundancy if they aren't full? I wish something was as easy as adding another disk and having the redundancy go up, then removing a disk and having the redundancy go down.

Mergerfs plus SnapRAID comes close to your ask:

https://perfectmediaserver.com/02-tech-stack/mergerfs/

Re: The Cheapest NAS

#70

Post by mmh0000 »

theshrike79 wrote: post #32
Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #3

Note that it doesn't look like it has ECC, so make sure to have backups. Fancy file systems like ZFS don't remove the need for ECC.

I've had non-ECC NAS systems for over 20 years and I've had exactly zero cases where memory corruption was an issue. It's OK for corporate systems, but complete overkill for personal setups.

As for my anecdote, I had a computer with 3 HDDs in a raid5, it had some of my very early programming projects and other various things which I wish I still had. But, I don't have any longer because something, I'm assuming memory, was silently failing and over 40% of the files were turned into jibberish and random binary bytes.

I now use ECC EVERYWHERE now. My laptop, my desktop, my little home server. All ECC. Because, ECC is cheap and provides a lot of protection for very little effort on my part.

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