Living on a busy street, my cameras would fill 40GB in just a few days. Ideally I’d like to have at least a few weeks if not months of retention. I’m also fiercely anti-subscription to the point of irrationality. I wouldn’t be in this community otherwise – I’d just have a Ring or Blink plan like a normie.
A big part of why I want a(nother) NAS (I already have two because I’m a maniac) is that I need a backup of my surveillance system’s footage, not only in case of data loss but also in case someone breaks in and steals my NVR – the device which would otherwise contain the only video of them breaking in and stealing my NVR.
As of last night, I have an offsite backup functioning so that problem is mostly solved, but I still wanted a redundant copy saved locally. Since the NUC is busy being a server and occasionally a PC, I was looking for something else that’s also small which I could hide from a burglar inside a wall or ceiling.
It’s a Ubiquiti UNVR with a four bay backplane running RAID 10 on 4x6TB drives for the primary/default storage but they recently added an archiving feature to the Protect app that can push events to cloud storage providers or local/offsite SMB file shares. This NAS will be one backup stage while another will be offsite at a friend’s house.
I love the idea of up-cycling but I was looking for something physically small/compact that I could hide easily in a ceiling or closet that wouldn’t also be unnecessarily power-intensive. My 10th gen NUC running Debian and a full *arr stack uses <5W at idle for example. I could end up using it as a NAS instead but I think I’d rather have it out in the open on a desk where I can still use it as a desktop as needed.
I also have a GOAT friend with a 2.5x2.5Gb symmetrical fiber connection who co-locates a server of mine for free as long as I share the storage with him. It’ll be a redundant offsite backup in addition to this NAS so I only need the most basic of features, not something with a whole desktop OS and/or entire ecosystem of available extensions and other packages.
Which model? I ordered one reliable one for a customer and another one that turned out to be a lemon.
What’s the OS situation? I like Synology’s proprietary stuff but it’s a like little too proprietary for some tasks and they seem to be getting greedy with these new OEM drive requirements. I like the idea of bare hardware even better where I can install whatever I want.
I like that idea. I have an extra Pi Zero – would that work or do I need more processing power? I’m looking at storing around 5-15GB per day.