Tech I’m using lately
Storage
Hardware
I had been using an old ass work station with Ubuntu installed as a makeshift home NAS for a while. Sometime in the fall of last year it died and I found myself needing to replace it.
I purchased a UGREEN DXP4800+ late last year on sale. It’s a fairly powerful little NAS for the price.
Currently, I’m running with 3 6TB NAS rated disks. One disk for parity and two for the merged filesystem. So I’ve got 12 TB total at the moment and one additional slot to grow if needed.
The vast majority of my storage is documents and photos - right now I’m using less than 2TB so I’m sure I’ve got plenty of storage to last me for a good long time.
NAS OS UNRAID
UGREEN is new to the NAS world and I don’t know how much I trust their early software so I’m running the NAS on UNRAID 7.0.
UNRAID has turned out to be an excellent OS for the applications I’m running. It makes managing filesystems easy and has a great UI to make setup a breeze.
I like the fact that I can add disks at will without worrying about extending file systems or doing much advanced planning, and I don’t even need to buy hard disks of the same size and speed.
Backup
I purchased a personal license of Duplicacy for $20 and set up a Backblaze B2 bucket to store my backups.
For a long time I was using restic for my backups, but I found that it had become tedious managing the scripts I wrote to do backups and restores.
Photos
I’m using the incredible immich to store my photos. It has both an iOS and Android app to sync from your phone.
I haven’t completely ditched iCloud for my photos. Immich is still very early software and even they don’t recommend using it as your only method to store photos. But so far my experience with it has been phenomenal. I find its search functions to be far superior to what Apple has in their photos app.
Document Management
I keep a lot of documents.
- Pay Stubs
- Tax Returns
- Bank and Credit Card statements
- Invoices
- Insurance documents
- Tuition payments
- User manuals
- and a lot more
Pretty much any document that I think I might want to look at again gets scanned and saved before I toss it.
If you keep a lot of documents I can’t recommend paperless enough.
File Sync
I have 3 computers syncing several directories. Some of the directories they sync are shared among the computers and some are only sync’d to the NAS (and then backed up nightly).
Syncthing can be as easy or as hard as you want it to be to setup. I have a fairly simple strategy where my personal computers and the NAS all have the same read and write permissions.
Network
Firewall
On the advice of a friend I picked up a 4 port Protectli Vault with OPNsense preinstalled.
Strictly speaking I’m not the most knowledgeable network person you’ll ever meet so the OPNsense setup took some trial and error. Mostly error, really.
This is a great little device and I’d consider ordering another some time to use as a mini server. It’s far more powerful than what I need for my own home network but hopefully that means it’ll have a long shelf life.
Wireless
I’ve got an old(ish) Orbi mesh system that I switched over to AP Mode once the firewall was up and running. I’d like to replace these with something that allows me to create some vlan’s but that is a lower priority for me at the moment.