[olex]

When I built my DIY NAS, the most important factor was: I wanted it _silent_. No constantly spinning drives or fans. It sits in a sideboard in my living room, and I've been using a M1 Mac for years now that is completely silent in normal daily operation, so I've become a bit sensitive to any "computer noises" and wanted my continuously running hardware to be as quiet as possible.

In practice this meant: a passively cooled Intel N100 SoC, a Corsair PSU that shuts down its fan under a certain power threshold (iirc 35W-ish), and SSD-only main storage. I did include a system fan (low-RPM 120mm Noctua) that is actively controlled based on various system temps (stays off 99% of the time), and two HDDs that sit in standby spindown and only spin up for snapshot backups once every three days deep at night.

Very happy with this system so far. It houses my data dump, backups for all my systems (replicated as snapshots to the HDDs), hosts HomeAssistant/Z2M, and hosts a local-only Gitea that keeps up-to-date clones of all my Github and Gitlab repos.

Anything I host that's available on the public Internet, I don't do from home - that's all on various VPS' or AWS. To access my local stuff remotely, I can always VPN in to my home network.

[madduci]

What is your backup strategy? What would happen if your NAS breaks?

[olex]

Multi-layered.

- Important stuff primarily lives in commercial cloud storage. All of that is also mirrored on the NAS.

- Everything from the NAS SSDs is dumped to the HDDs every 3 days. Both use MergeFS, so if any one drive dies (or both SSDs, or both HDDs), I can replace it and still have a copy of everything.

The entire NAS is also occasionally dumped to an external HDD that's stored at my parents' place. So basically, if the NAS breaks catastrophically, I am at risk of losing some recent stuff that hasn't been dumped there yet, but nothing of actual importance.