Spec me a NAS for: Local file backups + Mobile Phone Photo Backup + Personal Cloud

[MrRockliffe]

Hi all

I’m getting sick of never ending cost increases of cloud backup.

I bought 365 Family last year for £45. It’s now looking closer to £75+ and I’m sure it’ll keep going up.


Instead, I’d like to build something for my personal use.


I’m reasonably techy - built PCs, configured hackintoshes, work in IT operations etc. But I’d prefer an off the shelf solution I can buy (once!), setup and forget.



In my head, I’m thinking a decent NAS with SSDs.


I’d like it to be capable of:

- Storing local files and acting as a media storage for Plex and music.
- Photo backup with independent libraries for multiple people (I.e. I can add family members to it and they have their own libraries)
- “Cloud” storage for me when I’m out and about



The Synology stuff appealed but they’ve done some dodgy stuff with requirements of drives, and I can’t workout if they’ve reversed the decision and how much by.



TIA

 

[Bluecube]

Have a look at the Woostar and Ugreen NASs. Put Unraid on them and you’re sorted. I appreciate the need/ want to build something but this new generation of NAS/ PCs make it difficult to recommend a home build.

 

[robj20]

If I was buying today it'd be one of the Unifi ones.

 

[lsg1r]

Custom would be my route using unraid... I already am in fact, albeit mine was a custom build.

Miniforums nas, ugreen, terramaster all still support using your own os of choice as far as I'm aware if you want to get a pre-built system.

Synology have ditched the hard drive restrictions, sales must have dropped too much lol, but I still wouldn't touch them these days and I used to use them. They took away things like transcoding recently iirc.

Unifi looks ok as a pure file back up but that doesn't support plex last I checked so you would need a device to 'serve' media meaning they're pretty restricted if you want to do more. Same reason I can't go with their music streamer, it doesn't look to support local music (no idea why they skipped that)

 

[robj20]

Custom would be my route using unraid... I already am in fact, albeit mine was a custom build.

Miniforums nas, ugreen, terramaster all still support using your own os of choice as far as I'm aware if you want to get a pre-built system.

Synology have ditched the hard drive restrictions, sales must have dropped too much lol, but I still wouldn't touch them these days and I used to use them. They took away things like transcoding recently iirc.

Unifi looks ok as a pure file back up but that doesn't support plex last I checked so you would need a device to 'serve' media meaning they're pretty restricted if you want to do more. Same reason I can't go with their music streamer, it doesn't look to support local music (no idea why they skipped that)

I'd argue you don't want the two functions integrated together. They're very different tasks.
Use a NUC pc as a server and a Unifi NAS for storage, your free to upgrade the NUC as and when you need more features or more power.

 

[lsg1r]

I'd argue you don't want the two functions integrated together. They're very different tasks.
Use a NUC pc as a server and a Unifi NAS for storage, your free to upgrade the NUC as and when you need more features or more power.

I'm free to upgrade my custom build in the same way, unraid is pretty forgiving in swapping out hardware so all I'd have to do is essentially swap out the motherboard, cpu and ram or the controller card if I need more storage ... I shouldn't need to do it anytime soon mind with an i5 13500 in it but the option is still there, same goes with the controller card, I'm hoping 16 drives + 2 nvme and 4 sata ports is enough lol.

Also being off the shelf parts I can eaily get replacement parts, where nuc replacement parts if ever needed is usually a lot harder, coming from someone with a miniforums minipc where the only things I can easily source to replace is the ram and the ssds.

I'd argue theres a performance hit with plex on a nuc versus directly accessing it but I've never tested that.

There's also a chance ubiquiti (or other brands) might not continue to support their hardware after x years, something I've seen ubiquiti do a few times and while I like them they do have a tendency to have bugs which don't get fixed very quickly, especially on older hardware.

At the end of the day the storage side can be covered by pretty low end hardware, so any left over performance above that can be used for other stuff. I've seen plenty of plex servers run on n100/n150 boards and still manage file storage duties, I've seen a few plex servers on raspberry pi machines.

 

[MrRockliffe]

Hadn’t really looked into it but just assumed my Apple TV can do the heavy lifting for transcoding etc, and so just needed a basic NAS rather than something fancy with a powerful CPU.

 

[lsg1r]

Hadn’t really looked into it but just assumed my Apple TV can do the heavy lifting for transcoding etc, and so just needed a basic NAS rather than something fancy with a powerful CPU.

Apple tv is probably powerful enough to do any transcoding etc but you would need something on apple tv to pull the files from the server and then play them directly. Is there a media player on there that can access a shared network location? VLC would do it iirc but you would have no fancy front end.

My setup is using a firestick (and/or my phone) and jellyfin but plex basically would work the same.

• Server with storage - running unraid in my case
• Media in it's own share on server
• Jellyfin in a docker container running on unraid, this accesses the media folders on my server and then sets up a database and web based 'media server' to allow you to edit the metadata etc
• Firestick has a jellyfin app that acts as a player for the media server on my server, pulling in all the metadata etc for the shows/movies etc to give you that 'netflix' style front end.

Without the backend side of things you're basically looking at doing a dlna type server via a file manager and that isn't as pretty, works ok, I used to do that in the past using serviio

 

[Bluecube]

Hadn’t really looked into it but just assumed my Apple TV can do the heavy lifting for transcoding etc, and so just needed a basic NAS rather than something fancy with a powerful CPU.

It will but not with the Plex app. If you use Infuse (paid for app worth every penny) then the ATV will play just about anything you throw at it with any transcoding required.