Tim-Doerzbacher.com To distract myself from excruciating pain while paining for a dental procedure, I figured I’d go over what an ideal end state for my personal cloud would look like. Let’s start by looking at what devices I’ll need to be worried about as head of IT in my household.
Devices to Support
| Device | Operating System | Storage Space (GB) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pixel 2 XL | Android | 64GB | Most of this photos/videos taken w/ the camera app that I need off the phone |
| Old Samsung tablet | Android | 32GB (estimate) | Possibly going to be retired soon. Screen isn’t easy to read and it’s not fast enough to keep up with software bloat. |
| iPhone ? | iOS | 128GB (estimate) | Wife’s cat and flower photo collections must be treated with equal importance to financial records |
| iPad | iOS | 256G (estimate) | Used for audio books and researching supplies and materials for remodeling |
| Macbook Air | MacOS | 256GB (estimate) | Floater laptop that shouldn’t have much on it |
| Macbook Pro | MacOS | 512GB (estimate) | Important information and video editing |
| Custom 4U server | Linux | 8TB | This will be the server handling the cloud. It is the one that needs to be greater than all the other devices attached. Can’t be larger than 8TB at the moment due to that costing too much to backup w/ current hardware. |
| Dell XPS | Linux | 256GB | Floater laptop for serious software engineers who also value battery life |
| System76 Serval WS | Linux | 1TB | Ultimate badass laptop with a cooling system louder than jet engine with matching power |
Observations
- All systems are *nix systems. That affects nothing, but does make me happy.
- I’ll need, at minimum, 6TB to handle everything as is. I’ll therefore want 8TB in the server for allow for growth.
- Going above 8TB gets expensive, as single external drives larger than that are very expensive. Having two 8TB drives to rotate through is much more affordable.
- I can always add another 4TB drive to the RAID for a total of 12TB down the road. I’ll have to reconsider my backup plans potentially.
- This should keep me covered on space for a few years. Will definitely need to upgrade within 5 years, but no sooner than 2 years.
- This will create a lot of network traffic
- I was considering splitting the home network into multiple isolated networks:
- Private network for me and my wife
- Guest Network for friends and family
- IoT, Smart TVs, and other devices with histories of atrocious security
- Doing this ahead of time would definitely be feature creep for the “build my own cloud” project.
- Might just put the guests on the same network as the IoT, as neither are to be trusted.
- I’ve got a Raspberry Pi or two laying around for building a custom router
- I was considering splitting the home network into multiple isolated networks:
Conclusion
My goal is to get this new system up and running before 2021Q2. However, hardware is becoming harder to get one’s hands on. That’s why I expect this to take some time. I’m also expecting my tax return won’t be arriving before beginning of March.