How to Set Up a Raspberry Pi Storage Server With Just Running Off the USB Bus

Getting your storage setup just right often takes making painful mistakes first. We share ours, our current storage setups, when ZFS is not the tool for the job, and what you should consider when protecting your data.

Plus, we share a few recent project mishaps.

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Links:

• The Perfect Media Server - 2019 Edition — Reliable means you don't lose data. And that's exactly what the MergerFS + Snapraid combo I first wrote about in 2016 has provided. A solid, boring and reliable way of storing multiple TBs of data with little fuss.
• Getting started with ZFS on Linux — Here's a short article giving a ZFS 101 intro and list of commands in one place.
• New Hard Drive rituals — It is for these reasons that I now religiously do not commit any data to a drive until it has undergone at least one full cycle
• The 'hidden' cost of using ZFS for your home NAS — With ZFS, you either have to buy all storage you expect to need upfront, or you will be wasting a few hard drives on redundancy you don't need.
• Mergerfs: a featureful union filesystem
• A Chat with mergerfs Developer — Alex, Drew from ChooseLinux and Brent (of the Brunch fame) sit down with Antonio Musumeci, the developer of mergerfs during the JB sprint.
• Alex's one line mergerfs fstab entry
• My Photography Workflow