Hi. Been a while. Sorry about the little haitus. I have been working on multiple projects and I don’t think I’ve made considerable progress to write about yet, but it will be coming very soon!

Backups

Anyways. I applied for a 3D designer position. Although my portfolio was not very impressive which I knew when I applied, but gave it a shot anyway. Didn’t land it :(. But in the process of building my portfolio, I realized that I have a lot of files and projects that are not backed up. This has bothered me for some time, but going through all my projects, I didn’t want to lose 4 years and 1000+ hours worth of work, and that’s only Blender projects. I have many documents, and files that need to be backed up (around 1 TB), so I thought I should figure out some way to back up all my files.

NAS

Now I should preface this by saying that I very new to this field and if you have any suggestions please let me know at hamzaalsarakbi@gmail.com

So I’m very lazy when it comes to manually plugging in my external HDD and copying over specific files. I want to automate all that process in a sustainable way. So, I thought of building a little NAS and have it serve 3 functions.

1- An automatic weekly backup of all the computers in the house

2- A vault where I can store sensitive documents and files that I don’t want on my computer or just any files that I want to offload onto the NAS

3- Run Docker containers (Pi-hole, webservers, maybe Plex and Sonarr, etc.)

Hardware

Storage

My setup for now is 3x4TB NAS HDD’s in RAID 5. so the total storage is 12 TB but the total usable storage is 8 TB because the parity spread across the 3 drives amounts to 4 TB. This setup gives me the most usable storage and in case of a failing HDD, I can just replace said HDD and rebuild. I’m also thinking of maybe encrypting the drives on the NAS, although still undecided.

I have a 250 GB M.2 NVME SSD for the OS and whatever containers I’ll be running.

I might add a 128 GB SSD for caching, although I’ll look into that later.

Other components

My 2 options are either getting a prebuilt NAS server or a DIY setup. I went for a DIY setup for the fun of it and because I want to host multiple projects so an ARM processor ain’t cutting it for me.

Parts list:

I don’t think dual channel is critical for my use case so I went for a single stick

The whole setup with storage amounts to around $973.77 after tax.

I still haven’t bought any components yet since I might change some parts. I might opt for a Pentium CPU since I probably won’t need 4 cores unless if I end up hosting a Plex server. Regardless, let me know what you think!

Software

I’ll be running OpenMediaVault which is just a Debian fork aimed at NAS servers. It has a nice WebUI so you don’t have to remote into the NAS every time you try to access it.

This is it folks! Again let me know your thoughts at hamzaalsarakbi@gmail.com or Hamzaaa#9224 :)