Help me confirm my understanding about some things w/ Synology NAS and self-hosting in general reddit / selfhosted ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Sorry_Chemical · 2023-10-31 03:01 I've been overwhelmed with so much scattered self-hosted solutions, tutorials, and information. I think i've boiled down my decisions to a few things, and want to get it validated please: - i want to replace my Google Drive (which has the usual documents, and a couple video courses, regular videos from my iPhone, GoPro, etc.) - not planning to host a media server like Jellyfin - not planning to open up my NAS to public access - would like to create user accounts for each person in my household - i don't do any photo or film editing - would like to use the Office features and collaboration features with people in my household - no need for calendar or contacts - no need for chat or video conferencing stuff So i'm zero'ing in on getting a 2-bay Synology NAS (not sure which one yet). Maybe going to get 4TB or 8TB (these are arbitrary; open to sugestions). I read that i should get 2 of the same capacity, is this correct (as opposed to different ones, like a 4TB and a 12 TB?)? I'm also trying to make sense if I want to have Nextcloud on my Synology, or is it redundant since there is Synology Drive? I also want to transfer my iPhone photos/videos onto Synology. I wonder: if i delete a photo on my iPhone, would it also get deleted from Synology? What would be an easy way to transfer data/files from Google Drive and Google Photos to Synology NAS? ATM, i'm thinking that i download separate folders onto my PC, then move them to the Synology NAS? For the 2-bay Synology NAS, i intepret that the 2nd drive is used as a redundant of the 1st drive; but this shouldn't be treated as a back- up. So my backup options are... to send snapshots off-prem to another cloud provider, or maybe attach an external drive??? Am i missing anything, or have the incorrect understanding anywhere here? Lastly, i'm planning to wait for Black Friday for any deals... Thank you in advance! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- timothyclaypole · 2023-10-31 06:03 Definitely keep the disks identical. Mismatched disks typically end up with you wasting the capacity of the larger or you don’t get any resiliency and a failure in either disk wipes your data. Yes you need backups; encrypted cloud backups are a great answer but don’t just set it and forget it. You should regularly test that you are actually able to recover your data when you need to. There are going to be differences in how different software works, take time to experiment with Nextcloud and Synology Drive to see which works best for you. That advice includes your file transfer questions - try a few options and see what works for you. Treat RAM in a NAS just like you would in a PC. More of it doesn’t necessarily mean any one program will run faster but it does allow you to run more programs at the same time without slowing down all of them. Each docker app you run on your NAS will eat up some of your RAM. SSD will be significantly faster than HDD but cheap SSD can be less reliable and may (under write-heavy conditions) end up dieing sooner than HDD. With a 2 bay NAS you won’t be adding any extra writes for parity to any disk so all you have to think about is how much data do you expect to change and how frequently. Is this mostly an archive type case where you save a file and then probably only ever read it again infrequently? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- thekrautboy · 2023-10-31 07:33 Why not ask all these Synology questions in /r/Synology? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- tech2but1 · 2023-10-31 08:33 > Maybe going to get 4TB or 8TB (these are arbitrary; open to sugestions). I read that i should get 2 of the same capacity, is this correct (as opposed to different ones, like a 4TB and a 12 TB?)? 2 different sizes would work but if you're buying new then there is no reason to have 2 different sizes. > I'm also trying to make sense if I want to have Nextcloud on my Synology, or is it redundant since there is Synology Drive? Yeah I wouldn't bother with Nextcloud. /r/selfhosted has quite the hard on for it but but unless you really need Nextcloud specifically there's usually a more convenient option. If you have the Synology then Synology Drive is a more simple solution. NExtcloud does need a lot of work to keep running reliably. > I also want to transfer my iPhone photos/videos onto Synology. I wonder: if i delete a photo on my iPhone, would it also get deleted from Synology? Depends what/how you do it. You can use backup apps to just backup to a share on the NAS, use Synology's own backup tools or use file sync tools to keep both ends in sync. Options for doing it either way are possible > What would be an easy way to transfer data/files from Google Drive and Google Photos to Synology NAS? ATM, i'm thinking that i download separate folders onto my PC, then move them to the Synology NAS? Cloud Sync. I just have all my Google Drive/Dropbox/Cloud accounts directly linked to the NAS. > For the 2-bay Synology NAS, i intepret that the 2nd drive is used as a redundant of the 1st drive; but this shouldn't be treated as a back- up. So my backup options are... to send snapshots off-prem to another cloud provider, or maybe attach an external drive??? You can set it up to use all of the storage as storage (so 2x 4TB = 8TB usable) or redundant storage. As you point out though it isn't a backup, it is just a level of hardware redundancy. To do proper backups you would want to keep a copy on a USB drive and offsite (using say Hyper Backup to say Backblaze B2). > I'm searching on NewEgg and Amazon. Any other options to search? Anywhere reputable. > SHould i just upgrade the RAM to the max, like 16GB? Depends what you're doing with it. For simple file storage not necessary. > Should i just use SSD instead of HDD since SSD's seem better quality? Nope.