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A few weeks ago I had a hard drive fail on me. It was a backup drive and thankfully it didn’t have anything important on it. Still, I did lose some non-essential files. I have lost drives before, but I tend to keep most important things backed up in a couple of places and very important stuff gets the local and cloud backup treatment. That doesn’t mean I was happy about it.

I have thought about setting up a proper nas for a while. One built around a raid or zfs or both. It just always seemed like overkill. I have work files back up automatically in the background, and anything else that I don’t want to lose gets occasional manual backups. It’s a system that has worked well for me for ages. But losing that drive was the last straw.

Disks are getting pretty big these days. Two terabytes is a pretty common size for a drive. That’s an awful lot of files to lose when the drive dies, even if they might be less important.

So, yeah. I bought a nas.

It’s not a super fancy or new one, but it is one that I can install a custom version of Linux on so that I can use zfs. So that’s nice.

I know that I will have another drive die on me. It’s just inevitable. With this setup I should be able to lose a drive, replace it, and never lose a thing.

I don’t have it yet, but soon. Either it works great and I never have to mention data storage again, or this might be the first of many posts ranting about owning a nas.