<story><title>How do I safely store my files?</title><url>https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Ir0nMan</author><text>I will take this opportunity to highly recommend UNRAID. You can use an old computer, add in some internal hard drives, and boot it off a USB stick.&lt;p&gt;Drives can be added or subtracted at any time so the system grows as your data grows and unlike traditional RAID you can mix and match drives of different types and sizes. Because it is not a real RAID implementation you can pull out any data drive in your array and read the files residing on that drive in another system. Data is protected against drive failure by single or dual parity drives and using SSD&amp;#x27;s for caching is even supported.&lt;p&gt;For anyone that is mildly technically inclined and enjoys DIY solutions, I would recommend at least checking out UNRAID before purchasing a Synology NAS (or similar).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mceachen</author><text>Author here! I actually hadn&amp;#x27;t even heard of Unraid until about a year ago, when some of my beta users were asking for help with their docker setup, and when I asked their host OS, they said &amp;quot;UnRAID&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;The community is supportive, templates are created and updated quickly, and there are several youtubers that make great, easy-to-follow videos for care and feeding your server. +1.</text></comment>
<story><title>How do I safely store my files?</title><url>https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Ir0nMan</author><text>I will take this opportunity to highly recommend UNRAID. You can use an old computer, add in some internal hard drives, and boot it off a USB stick.&lt;p&gt;Drives can be added or subtracted at any time so the system grows as your data grows and unlike traditional RAID you can mix and match drives of different types and sizes. Because it is not a real RAID implementation you can pull out any data drive in your array and read the files residing on that drive in another system. Data is protected against drive failure by single or dual parity drives and using SSD&amp;#x27;s for caching is even supported.&lt;p&gt;For anyone that is mildly technically inclined and enjoys DIY solutions, I would recommend at least checking out UNRAID before purchasing a Synology NAS (or similar).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gregmac</author><text>Another one to look at is snapraid [1]. Open source, also supports mix of disk sizes, adding&amp;#x2F;removing, and drives are usable alone. Negatives are it does scheduled (not real-time) parity, and you have to run mergerfs yourself on top of you want a consistent view.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been using it for a few years, and it&amp;#x27;s survived one drive failure (which I replaced with a disk twice the size). I originally had it on a Ubuntu server but have since migrated to running in openmediavault (which does all the setup for you), on a vm within proxmox server.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.snapraid.it&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.snapraid.it&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>