[Brad]

Originally Posted by turtle So I'm the guy who is gonna say Synology because I'm tried of having to do my job at home and just don't want to mess with it.

Excellent! Then maybe you can help answer some of my questions about Synology that aren't easily found in their marketing materials.

Two main features I would use if I build my own NAS are 1) mirror or full parity across multiple drives and 2) the ability to add larger drives, migrate data off of the smaller ones, and remove the smaller ones to free up slots for future larger drives. The former to protect against hardware failures and bit rot which is actually what happened to the first of my two drives; it has a couple of catastrophically bad sectors that are impossible to read now no matter what tools I use (the drive physically stops responding). The latter to facilitate easier expansion over time. So, I'd want a PC or a NAS with at least 3 or 4 drive bays, though probably only two bays would be occupied most of the time.

It looks like SHR would fit the bill for at least the first case. How well does it copy or rebalance when adding new drives and removing old ones? From what I can tell, Synology doesn't support ZFS, which itself isn't a deal breaker, but I know ZFS has commands to add/remove devices and copy/rebalance data pretty seamlessly.

Also, since ZFS checksums everything, when it periodically scrubs to verify its checksums, it can use the parity data to automatically fix most damage. Do you know if SHR has any similar automatic data loss detection and recovery process?

Originally Posted by turtle The critical items are actually backed up in iCloud Drive really.

My most critical documents are periodically archived and encrypted using borg and synced to Google Drive with rclone. I have 1TB of free storage in Google Drive since I have Google Fiber, and I'm using about 185 GB for my encrypted archive, but ideally I'd commit several TB in a proper 3-2-1 strategy. Going forward I'm thinking about getting a Backblaze account and shoving everything in the cloud and not relying on Google's infra.

Originally Posted by kscherer Hmmm … seems like you're overcomplicating

You should see me in the kitchen trying to decide what to make for dinner!

Originally Posted by chucker nonononono stahp Buy a NAS. You're not a teenager any more. You have real data, important data on there, and you don't have the time to play janitor for some custom-rolled community junk.

I hear you. Really, I do! But some of the best software out there is "custom-rolled community junk"! Every wifi router I've owned for at least the last decade has gotten upgraded with custom firmware because the stock firmware was slow, anemic, and late (if ever!) to get security patches. I figure these NASes are all just running Linux with a bunch of open-source tools anyway with a shiny branded UI on top. So, why not go straight to the source and trim the fat?

That's my first line of thinking, of course. Yes, buying a prefab appliance means a much lower investment in setup time and maybe some kind of official support channel if things go wrong. I don't relish the idea of maintaining vdevs and zpools and all that stuff. It'd be fun to learn, but I don't want to spend more time troubleshooting than I have to. But I also don't want to drop a bunch of cash on an appliance only to be gobsmacked with buyer's remorse, realizing I could have done it better myself. I really do want to hear your experiences with Synology to teach me what I probably need to know.

As for tinkering, I don't mean that I'd be tinkering on it as a live system. Even if I go with TrueNAS, I'd be running through its setup process in a VM and getting comfortable there long before installing it on my "production" hardware.

Originally Posted by chucker Install Docker on Synology

Ah, good! You've preempted another one of my questions about Synology devices. Now that I'm looking that up on their site, I'm glad to see that virtualization and Docker in particular are headline features, but I'm a little concerned that they're only available on certain models. I'll have to be very careful choosing one because the ~$370 DS418 I was originally looking at doesn't appear to support virtualization, but the nearly identical ~$500 DS420+ does. Weird.

Originally Posted by chucker btrfs

In my on-again, off-again research (I've been quietly reading about this stuff for months), I came across a lot more horror stories involving btrfs than ZFS. I read about how Red Hat abandoned it a few years ago because maintaining it was a huge pain, and it supposedly has had several serious (but arguably edge-case) bugs, and that all gives me pause. Do you use btrfs? On what kind of scale/load?

Originally Posted by drewprops I want in on this party!!!! I am an idiot!!!!!!

Captain on deck! One of us. One of us!