How do I set up a home server for backup and media files?

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Level 1

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How do I set up a home server for backup and media files?

I've both outgrown my two local backup drives and know that the newer Macs come with much less hard-drive storage. Still, I want to have my photos, music, and backups to be local rather than iCloud-based.

How do I get started? I have three Macs, one iPad, and two phones worth of data to manage, and nearly 20 years of photos/music to wrangle.

I am pretty sure there are other threads that I should be reading, so feel free to point me over to those, but my searches for "set up home server" and "set up media server" were not pulling up what I needed.

Thanks!

iMac 21.5″ 4K, 12.6

Posted on Nov 23, 2024 3:03 PM

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Answer 1

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MrHoffman

Community+ 2025

Level 10

130,079 points

Nov 23, 2024 5:58 PM in response to RhetRx

I’ve been using Synology for most of that, but — given the likely value of the accumulated data — recognize that one NAS box or one RAID array does not a backup make. Synology can go off-site for redundancy, and there are other options.

PS: when decoding the naming of the Synology boxes, the last two digits are the ~year that the box was released. More recent boxes can be preferable.

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Answer 2

Tesserax

Level 10

154,102 points

Nov 23, 2024 5:40 PM in response to RhetRx

The best way to get started is to consider getting a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. It is basically a computer with built-in drives.

There are a number of NAS manufacturers. Two popular ones are Synology and QNAP.

FWIW. I have a Synology DS916+ NAS. I use it as a music server, file server, and for Time Machine backups.

Here's one example: https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS423+

Ref: NAS Selector - Synology

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Answer 3

RhetRx Author

Level 1

9 points

Nov 24, 2024 2:07 PM in response to MrHoffman

Yes, I know that more than one drive/array is necessary for a real backup system. Drives can go bad, and relying on one alone is....unwise. Thank you for the Synology info!

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