I’ve been researching NAS and am figuring out how one can play into my current home setup. There’s a lot I don’t know even after researching. Best I explain to clear things up.
Currently, I have a home server running NextCloud, accessible only via my LAN network. It’s run along with a VPN on a Raspberry Pi 4B running Ubuntu Server. The data is on two 512 GiB external SSD drives. One drive is primary & the other is backup of the primary drive via rsync each day.
I’m looking at a NAS for more backups (Ex. 1 day, 3 days, & 1 week at least) since I have sensitive data on the drives. I want to feel more secure about my home setup with the ability to rollback changes if I mess up something. I also want the NAS to be able to run more services other than just NextCloud eventually, like Grocy/KitchenOwl, etc.
I have some more questions about NAS given my info:
- Do I have to use a special NAS-specific OS to make use of the NAS hardware? Like to do snapshots and stuff?
- Kinda related: what if I install something like Debian/Ubuntu on it? Can I still use the NAS hardware in the same way?
I looked into some solutions like TrueNAS and Synology. I prefer an OS that’s free software so I have control over what I’m doing and not held hostage if they want to increase prices, force upgrades, enshittify things, etc.
I’ve been using OpenMediaVault inside Proxmox.
I’ve been very happy with OMV, for the short time I’ve been playing with it. Its FOSS and the web interface makes it very clear all the layers of abstraction you can use to manage a NAS. I highly recommend it.
And proxmox is good too, also FOSS (proxmox VE). I also has another slick web interface to manage stuff. I like the web interfaces because, albiet intimidating, it exposes alot of options available to me, which give me opportunities to research and understand how it works.
But I’m still working on getting everything with it set up, so take my suggestion with a grain of salt!
OMV looks really nice! Do I need to choose between NextCloud and OMV? Looks to me like they have some overlapping functionality (Ex. storing files).
Way different. Nextcloud is like the user experience for interfacing with some files. OMV actually manages different hard drives, partitions, file systems, raid, and then on top of those file systems can share folders with certain users using NFS or samba or something else.
You can use OMV to handle the hardware and OS related things. Run nextcloud on its own. It can do a billion things, like google drive/docs/keep/gmail can. It calls these apps. There is a files app. You could internally deploy nextcloud so the files app stores all files at a particular location, such as a partition you made with OMV.
