I’m so stucked… Black Friday reactivated the “store everything on a NAS” project in my poor brain. As the goal is quite simple : reduce to the minimum the use (and the costs) of our family iCloud plan, you would expect the solution is simple (of course not…). But should also be added to the equation the need to secure data already on external usb disks. (And aging). So, the quest for the right choice begins with a Nas appliance. Syno? No thanks, solid software, old hardware and discutable moves to lock everyone to use their parts catalog. So… considered ugreen Nas such as dxp2800 (two disks, not very upgradable so use huge capacity for a start). Dxp4800 four bays so it is possible to gradually extend the pool in the future. Then there is also MiniPC with nvme slots such as beelink Me Mini. In all cases, storage will be ZFS and data should be encrypted (don’t want thieves to read my data). Software will likely be truenas. A bare FreeBSD would be great but I have no time or skills to build everything from scratch with the insurance that I don’t leave some door opened for exploits. Either ugreen and N100 based pc should be enough for immich and one or two lightweight containers/jails. Costs are also to be considered, as RAM and disks (and NVME) are becoming very pricey. I read some blogs articles from our barista and of course it was so very interesting to build a backup server, remote access in a diy manner, (the geek in me was very tempted, but the end-user in me having to ensure the data from everybody in the house is secured is worried) #homelab #NAS