this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2026
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[Help] Improving HDD storage setup for personal server (lemmy.zip)
submitted 6 days ago by selfmate@lemmy.zip to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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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?

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[–] ImgurRefugee114@reddthat.com 2 points 5 days ago

Others have answered most questions but I just wanted to point out a few things:

NAS is network attached storage: a separate server which makes 'shares'/volumes available over the local network. A DAS is 'direct attached storage' which plugs directly into a machine. Since you have a server, a NAS is probably the right route. https://www.techradar.com/features/das-vs-nas-what-is-the-difference

Good that you mentioned both backups and redundancy as they're not the same. https://www.tencentcloud.com/techpedia/108368

Some people want a dedicated machine for being a NAS, while others want to make use of the hardware by making it pull double-duty as a server. I have an old PC I loaded up with drives and installed truenas on: I made zfs pools (opposed to raid) and exposed shares to the network. I can set up virtual machines or use "plugins" / jails for hosting other services like immich etc. E.g. https://www.truenas.com/docs/solutions/integrations/nextcloud/

Regarding backup versioning, modern filesystems like zfs and brfs have snapshot features. Regarding "one backup", it depends how important it is to you. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/