Staring my Home Lab

For a while now I’ve been looking to get a proper home NAS (Network Attached Storage) device to bolster the home office. I know all too well the pain of losing data to corrupted hard drives, lost USB keys or, in one case, an IDE drive in a world of SATA connections (which is another story to investigate). To try and prevent further losses of data, I’ve been looking to adopt the 3-2-1 philosophy of data backups. This concept suggests that there be 3 copies of any important data, 2 copies locally backed up and 1 backed up offsite/in the cloud.

To start this process I purchased a Synology 2 Drive NAS with two 8TB hard drives to fill the bays. It’s worth noting that 8TB is plenty of space for the data that really matters to me and my data backup policy, but having the larger drives allows me to copy ISOs, share larger files with friends and family and, critically, leaves plenty of space for allocation to more interesting pursuits. With these two drives I set them up to mirror each other using the inbuilt synology version of RAID so that I would at least achieve my redundancy within the NAS to start with.

While the initial few weeks of getting my data into a proper filing system (which is deserving of a blog post all on it’s own) took the majority of my focus, it wasn’t long until I was beginning to look into some of the more advanced features that synology offers it’s users.

There are dozens of apps around file management, a full office suite, backup tools and some fun utilities such as a self hosted wiki in the form of MediaWiki and a set of tools around self hosting my own applications. There are many built also for development purposes such as the local git server, apache server and database options as well as a number of supported programming languages such as node, php and python.

There’s even a plugin for wordpress but after self hosting a wordpress website in my youth and waking up one morning to find it turned into a pharmaceutical website completely written in Russian, I have since lost faith in both wordpress itself and my own ability to keep the likes of it patched against bad actors.

Ultimately though this post here is to call out that I’m quite happy with this purchase and would recommend highly for anyone looking to learn a bit more about server management as it’s a good way to get to grips both via traditional tooling but also via some of synology’s more sophisticated control options.