This is all super helpful, appreciate it. Just for clarity, the mini PC right now is one of those tiny HP EliteDesks. Definitely no room to fit any extra drives, but I already pulled the trigger on a second machine after doing some more research, and that should be plenty for something that’s basically just going to be a storage box.
Good catch on the redundancy, at the time posting this I didn’t realize I needed the physical space/drives to set up that safety net. 8 should be plenty for the time being. Say if I wanted to add another drive or two down the road, what sort of complications would that introduce here?
I do have a backup plan but the mirror safety net is definitely a good call, since it’s not an ideal solution. Right now I’m storing most backups internally, on a small USB drive, and uploaded to a b2 bucket, while I’m manually backing up all of that plus my media/emulation library to a 20TB external drive once a month and shoving it in my storage unit in between.
Good to know network latency shouldn’t be too noticeable, guess that does make sense. I don’t expose anything publicly, LAN/VPN only and it’s just my wife and I here, so I’m not too concerned with locking down access any more than it needs to be.
Incredible info, thank you so much for this. Next investment will definitely be a couple of extra drives then - the 8 will be fine for a bit but I’m definitely gonna outgrow that space within a month or two