Technology

I run everything on a lean Ubuntu server install. My Ansible playbooks then take over and set up ZFS and docker. All of my hosted services are in docker, and their data and configs are contained, regularly snapshotted, and backed up in ZFS.

I run basically all of the Arr stack, Plex (more friendly to my less tech savvy family then my preferred solution Jellyfin), HAss, Frigate NVR, Obsidian LiveSync, a few Minecraft worlds, Docspell, Tandoor recipes, gitea, Nextcloud, FoundryVTT, an internet radio station, syncthing, Wireguard, ntfy, calibre, Wallabag, Navidrome, and a few pet projects.

I also store or backup all of the important family documents and photos, though I haven't implemented Immich just yet, waiting for a few features and a little more development maturity.

About 30TB usable right now.

I had a 24 bay SAS racked external system piped into a racked server I had for many years. Experimented with tons of filesystems (played with ZFS so much), had a gazillion hard drives spinning, and ran Plex. I learned a ton from the experience, and lost many drives over the years (average 2 a year. I was rough on them.)

Nowdays, an intel NUC with an external hard drive. Using jellyfin and *arrs for the obvious, then a small kubernetes cluster for learning.

Used a QNAP for a bit when I was in a motorhome full-time, but found it wasn't powerful enough for more than filesharing and went to the NUC instead.

Assembled a server with Supermicro X9DRL-IF board and an old case. I figured I wanted ecc to safeguard against corruption on top of using btrfs. Harvested old laptop drives to build out a decent sized storage array for my purposes. Rationale overall was: cheaper to assemble than a purpose built NAS that had ecc and moderate compute power, more storage expansion options.

99% of the function has been serving samba/sftp shares. Started using nextcloud w/ memories to sync and tag photos from mobile. Standardized everything I run to opensuse tumbleweed/microOS.

I built my own, use XigmaNAS and RaidZ3 across 15 2TB disks for 22TB usable. Backup is now my main PITA - I lost a previous array with RaidZ2 by losing 3 disks trying to rebuild, so while I should have known better, RAID is not a backup. However, finding large external disks with any sort of reliability seems hard - so many bad reviews of 12TB etc disks. For now, I'm actually only using about 3.2TB and so can backup to jottacloud, but it's slow with my internet. I think the first full backup tool 3 months or something. Luckily I use something that is all incremental after that, but I probably actually need to set up a 20TB disk or something to just make full copies over to occasionally.

I have a Synology DS 918+. I run just their apps for photos, surveillance station & as file sever. Separately I run promox on Intel NUC for services need more resources than the NAS has such as Plex (with transcoding), home assistant & another AI like NVR called frigate (with TPU). Overall it’s a good low power & stable setup but the fan on NUC can be annoyingly loud at times.

I have an Ubuntu VM running on my Proxmox server. It just exports some folders over NFS that I mount from my laptops and PC. Then I have Nextcloud running in a separate VM so my phone can upload photos. The NC storage is all the NFS mounted folders from the NAS. Simple and works.