I’m thinking of backing all of my family’s digital assets up. It includes less than 4 TB of information. Most are redundant video files that are in old encodings or not encoded at all and there are a lot of duplicate images and old documents. I’m gonna clean this stuff up with a bash script and some good old manual review, but first I need to do some pre-planning.

• What’s the cheapest and most flexible NAS I can make from eBay or local? What kind of processors and what motherboard features?
• What separate guides should I follow to source the drives? What RAID?
• What backup style should I follow? How many cold copies? How do I even handle the event of a fire?

I intend to do some of this research on my own since no one answer is fully representative but am appreciative of any leads.