Hello anons! You might remember me from >>4425207 a while back. I have since set up some very neat desktop servers (both Synology) and I thought other anons may find this information useful.

For the storage of highly important and personal stuff, I ended up picking a "DS620slim" filled with SSDs (for low-noise and compactness). With 6x 4TB drives in RAID6, I have 16 TB (14.5 TiB) to work with which can be easily mirrored onto a "portable" external HDD. For the time being, I'm using an 8TB portable SSD and a 16TB external HDD as backups. The HDD is powered off for most of the time to reduce noise, and the portable SSD is used as the "off-site" backup (easily accessible, travels with me). Eventually, I'll need a 16TB SSD as the amount of data stored increases, but unfortunately there are no well-tested consumer products with that capacity in current year. If I end up needing more space for backups, I'll probably just use two 8TB portable SSDs.

Additionally, I've also built a much larger HDD array for a lot of the "bulky" data I work with (non-p) that I'd like to be stored more reliably. I'm still a bit unsure about how I'll handle the backups for those: I plan on getting a magnetic tape drive to properly back up this data, but I also want to keep a third centralized copy somehow. Any suggestions? I suppose I could pay money for "cloud" storage, but at that point, I suspect it'd be more cost-effective to simply built a second server at another location and mirror the data. Currently the server functions as a "backup" for a bunch of DAS, so it's not the only copy.

The whole process of setting these things up was surprisingly user-friendly. I feel a little silly for being intimidated by it. My main gripe is that Synology's DSM (server OS) gets upset when you use "off-brand" drives (i.e. not "Synology" brand), so I had to use a script to disable the stupid warnings that the server spits out. Otherwise, a very handy solution. Thanks for all of your advice, anons.