this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2026
51 points (98.1% liked)

Selfhosted

60210 readers
944 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

Detailed Rules Post

  1. Be civil.

  2. No spam.

  3. Posts are to be related to self-hosting.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or readme if you're providing a link.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title.

  6. No trolling.

  7. Promotion posts require active participation, with an account that is at least 30 days old. F/LOSS without a paywall has exceptions, with requirements. See the rules link for details.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
ruud@lemmy.world
Loki@lemmy.world
CannaVet@lemmy.world
devve@lemmy.world
ayyy@sh.itjust.works
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
curbstickle_lw@lemmy.world
51
[Help] Improving HDD storage setup for personal server (lemmy.zip)
submitted 5 months ago by selfmate@lemmy.zip to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
39 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I want a server running nextcloud, immich and others.

I have a N100 mini server with a 2TB external HDD. I want to secure the system against data loss. Hence, I want a backup and redundancy.

  1. Most important question: How do I build everything? Is this a NAS? My naive approach is to buy 3 external HDDs and connect them to the N100 with a USB hub. I assume this is not "the right way" but to use/build a NAS. Do I have to build a separate NAS computer? When I lookup NAS buying, it is a computer with a case for 4 drives, excluding the drives and costs 400 bucks. I am confused because this is incredibly expensive compared to what I already have. What is the additional benefit compared to my setup? Am I cheap?

  2. Regarding redundancy, is RAID still the way to go? At 2 TB, using RAID 5 with 3 drives sounds good. I'd have 4 TB of usable space, much more than I intend to use in the next years, and adding a drive increases the storage by 2 TB, effectively increasing space by 50%.

  3. I have 4 TB usable space, but I won't reach 2 TB in the next one or two years. I'd use a 2 TB HDD for a local backup via borg. Once my hot storage needs to increase, I replace the backup drive with a larger one and use it to increase the RAID storage. Is one backup sufficient? Or should I keeping multiple versions of the data. Daily, weekly, monthly backups? What is your experience with it?

  4. Another 2 TB HDD for an offsite backup, LUKS encrypted, backed up once a year (that's the goal for now).

Does that sound good?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] mrmaplebar@fedia.io 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I think that sounds pretty solid to me. Realistically you should count on having 3x drives for your important data:

  1. The main data drive(s)
  2. Drive(s) for redundancy, mirroring the data drives. (I use btrfs RAID1 for this.).
  3. Offline local hard drive(s) that you keep somewhere relatively safe that you occasionally backup to.
  4. (Optionally) Some kind of offsite backup.

So if you plan on having 2TB of data, you'll ideally want 3x 2TB drives. 2 in the PC mirroring eachother, and 1 in a closet or safe that you plug in and backup to a few times per year. (With bonus points if you can get another 2TB of off site or cloud storage to also backup to, in case of catastrophy.)

As for how you build it, I think it doesn't matter too much. Its possible to use whatever random spare PC parts you have to make a decent home server, imo. A lot of people on YouTube and Reddit have all kinds of fancy servers in a rack, but an old repurposed desktop can be fine. ( I would probably use new, decent quality drives though.)

[โ€“] selfmate@lemmy.zip 1 points 5 months ago

thank, that's good to read!