Thanks for the input.
I was hoping to start the ‘real’ deployment this weekend, but reality has intervened.
My professional background is enterprise data center server administration.
One of the things that is making this difficult is that I want to have the backup in place as soon as this goes live. I may not have a full 3-2-1 in place on day one, but there will be a plan to get there.
Unraid would be easier to fit into the equipment I have today, but it makes the backup solution more complicated. With TrueNAS, I can use replication to second server, and to a remote server, to meet the redundancy target. This is pretty much a solved problem.
I am considering a Proxmox cluster to cover services, and for the lab environment (likely a different cluster). Since I was going to stand this up eventually, the possibility of using Proxmox to manage the file storage as well is attractive. I like have a single dashboard to see the state of my environment. (Of course, I could create my own to collect state from whatever solution I end up with, so this is a very minor benefit.)
Initially, I am looking to use this for storage of data I currently have on a number of small (mostly USB) drives while I am clearing out old equipment we have accumulated over a couple decades. This is purely cold storage.
The next item is a local backup target. Currently, I am using a combination Backblaze and CrashPlan. This will get me to 3-2-1 for those systems.
After that, I will be collecting pictures I have in various media into one place and properly backing them up.
Finally, I will need shared storage if I once high-availability of the services running in the cluster.
@Airstripone I agree that ZFS is the standard for storage integrity. However, I also agree that backups are required. While ZFS is better, Unraid is likely good enough for local reliability.
@edge-case That looks like what I am envisioning. I was hoping to be able to do several of the functions on a single system, at least at the start. Since I want storage first, I’m thinking to start with just that, and grow from there.
Current issue is that I can only connect 2 drives internally on the old system I plan to use which is a large reason I was looking at Unraid, as that can work with the required flash drive and two array drives. However, TrueNAS looks like it will be the best for the full solution due to the ease of replication. I just need to figure out a way to get a third device attached that I can boot from.