My Family FreeNAS Build - Intro

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[Dragan]

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Aug 2, 2015
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Hi everyone,

Dragan here from the land down under or Australia for those looking at the map.

After a long time of lurking in and around this forum, I have decided to join and share my “story”. Over this time I have become very impressed with the wealth of knowledge presented here as well as the easy going approach of this helpful and sharing community. I’m confident that my opinion will not change as I go through this journey with you. Bear with me. :)

First off all, I want to stress to you all to please feel free to comment and critique on my progress as long as it’s constructive in nature and helpful in any shape or form. It could all prove to be critical to me as well as any other new member that could be on a similar building path as myself. The golden rule here is that we can all learn more from each other’s experiences and hopefully prevent others in making the same mistakes that could have been easily avoided.

Let’s get building! Shall we?

The initial idea….

Time has come to finally commit and invest some money in a home server that will fit to all of my young family’s needs. The ultimate goal is to have a “low maintenance” NAS box that I can initially spend time/money building and setting up right. Quiet possibly being a little overkill to begin with but I'm fine with that.

This in return should hopefully allow me and my family [here & abroad] to have all of our personal/homes data centralised, kept safe and securely in one spot with easy access to whatever/whenever.

I will still continue to rely on a couple external devices as another form of redundancy on only the most important parts of personal data i.e. baby photos/videos. You can never have too many copies.

Mass storage for:
All of my scanned documents
House/appliance manuals
Family photos/videos
Music Collection
Movie Collection


Backup for:
All computers, tablets, phones
Work related material


Streaming:
Plex server for up to 4 simultaneous devices, 1 to 2 regularly

Own Cloud:
“Cloud” like access or possible capabilities

The main build reason…

The need for such device has become ever more apparent and extremely important to me with the recent addition to my family, and not to mention also the recent HDD failure that has made me little paranoid about all future data storage solutions of such precious content. I’m not worried about the “replaceable” content but the memories that cannot be replaced or ever replicated. Lucky I have fared much better than most others when it comes HDD failure rates and I have grown to understand that data loss is inevitable. It’s not a matter of how but rather when? This is a good enough reason alone for investing so much money into such project.

I also understand that I could have gone down the same old route of just purchasing a purpose pre-built nas device for the storage solution above but i wanted to ensure that I am less limited with my own build rather then that type of all-in-one hardware available.

The other build reasons….

Being in possession of numerous external hard drives, all matter of different brand names and capacities as well as age, has made it almost impossible to quickly access anything on them on the fly and it has become extremely difficult to find certain files without committing a whole lot of time. Time that as a new parent I am struggling to allocate to and have. I consider myself a bit of an organisational freak and even so it’s still proven to be too difficult. Either because of files/drives locations, amount of different content accumulated over past 15 years or other far more non convenient reasons associated with such storage solutions.

Another reason is to hopefully clear some of the physical clutter as well as have all of its media contents digitally imported into one location. I wait for the day when I can pack all the cd’s, dvd’s, blurays, flash memory cards/sticks, external hdd’s into a storage box somewhere.

Periodic backup of all of the devices currently in use.

Sharing of content with my immediate family and friends, especially the loved ones overseas.

The beauty of streaming content throughout the whole home environment as well as potential external ones appeals a lot to me.

Final words…

Thank you for taking your time in reading this and hopefully your patience as well as understanding throughout this building process, I look forward to all of your input in regards to getting this project on the way as well as up and running. I have over 15 years of working in and around computers [not on a professional level] and I welcome any new information I can learn from you guys here.

As I tackle this challenge on my own and with some of your help I am sure I will be able to “avoid becoming a statistic” even though we are a form of some sort of statistic regardless. ;)

I’m glad I can be of some small contribution to this growing community even though I might not be doing anything more or that different to many others already on here.

Next topic….
Hardware selection [mostly purchased]

Cheers,

Dragan
 
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gpsguy

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Joined
Jan 22, 2012
Messages
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Welcome to the forums! I too, lurked for several months before joining the forum.
 
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