New NAS OS for auto cellphone photo backup

Hi, I’m building a sandy bridge based NAS for auto cellphone photo backups (at least on a weekly basis).

This will be my first nas build but I’m comfortable with entry level terminal/Linux.

Preference would be Web based access for maintenance (same lan).

Which os should I be looking at first?
Anyone setup something similar?

Cheers for any help you can give!

Start by looking at what you need/want to use for backup such as Syncthing and go from there.

Just go with what you’re comfortable with, FreeBSD, Debian etc

Not a nas-specific build like freenas etc?

You can’t really go wrong with any Linux distro for a NAS. If you’re a beginner I’d suggest you to go with Openmediavault since it’s a basic distro that offers a nice web GUI to do almost everything you’ll need to do.

As a backup software for photos what I use is Syncthing for the files and Photoprism to review them in a gallery. If you’re not interested in seeing them in a gallery you can stick with Syncthing. It does all the routing for you so you won’t need a DNS for it, unlike many if all the other solutions.

3 Likes

Legend! that’s exactly what I needed.

1 Like

Depends on your requirements, FreeBSD or TrueNAS Core is to recommend if you want to use ZFS for example however you as I said before need to look up that you have packaged software available that fits your needs.

1 Like

Thank you

I second the TrueNAS, but I prefer the Scale variant. Its linux and will run with your realtek LAN.

1 Like

One thing that’s worth mentioning about Syncthing is that, well, it syncs things (by default). So if you delete something on your phone or a file gets corrupted, then by default, you’ll also lose the synced copy on your NAS.

I use Syncthing and I get around the issue in two ways. First of all, I enable some kind of Versioning in Syncthing. My personal preference is for “Trash Can File Versioning” but read through the document I linked and make your own mind up… and bare in mind that my decision to use Trash Can File Versioning is based in part on my second line of defence…

My second line of defence is ZFS snapshots… Snapshots are one of the many things that I think makes ZFS great, and it’s why I think it should be considered when you’re looking into operating systems for storage servers but… it’s not without it’s drawbacks. Make sure to research some of it’s limitations (i.e. if a pool fails, it’s practically impossible to recover) and caveats (i.e. how you increase storage capacity), and how to administer ZFS.

2 Likes