Storage solution for personal and ripped media

[Amoenus]

Hello, a fan of the channel here

I am writing in a hope of some advice since I experience analysis paralysis right now.

Let me describe my setup.

The data:
- Critical:
    - 1TB Raw footage from my wedding is currently only 1 copy, which is the scariest
    -  50GB Photos in Google Photos/Drive
- Important:
  - 10-20 GB Documents scattered across Google Drive/Laptop/Phone (Word, Excel, PDF, etc)
  -Nice to have:
  - 10 GB small collection of eBooks and magazines.
  - 1,5 TB of Movies/TV Shows in watch -> delete mode

Hardware:
- Mercusys Router with USB port with the ability to attach a drive
- USB 3.0 HDD reader (rather not use it as it has drive exposed, so no protection)
- NVIDIA SHIELD TV Pro 500 GB (old one) - some movies are here (Plex Media Server 1 is here)
- Laptop with 1 500MB SSDs and 1 TB SSD (full with Wedding Footage)
- Raspberry Pi 400 with 256GB SSD and 4GB RAM
- Hosted virtual private server (VPS) with 1TB (Plex Media Server 2 is here)

I am running out of space and facing a dilemma. I am on a fairly limited budget but currently have only 1 copy of critical footage that I would love to secure (ideally with the 3-2-1 principle).

I am tech savvy so not need a turnkey solution.

I am contemplating if I can have an external HDD attached to NAS/Shield/Raspberry Pi (but concerned about reliability and performance) or if I should buy a budget NAS (e.g Synology 218 + 4TB WD Red Plus).

Raspberry Pi runs all my container workloads, and Shield can act as a Transcoder, so NAS will only serve data)

I would like to lessen the reliance on cloud storage (at least to free up space for wedding footage backup) and ideally would like to phase out my VPS.

Most of the media I consume can be played via DirectPlay and I would only transcode for bandwidth reasons on my phone. VPS is not powerful enough for that, so I experience buffering. That is why I store some media on SHIELD.

Hope my use case is clear enough for you to give me a suggestion.

[ed]

You will need a Celeron-based NAS such as DS220+ to be able to create your own private VPS at home. Otherwise, you could go for cheap DS218/ ds220j and use it for backups and media source. You will achieve better transcoding results with ShieldTV. Plus series NAS would allow more backup options such as server/windows image backups and snapshots and more. But simple schedules backups on your chosen folders are still possible via Drive app.

I hope this helps.

[Amoenus]

Yes, thank you! Something to think about