So I’m quite new to the self hosting world, and not the most tech savvy, but I’m looking for a way to expand and increase the reliability of my file storage. I used to just use cloud storage but got concerned about privacy and environmental impact and whittled down all of my data to about 200GB including all my music, photos, movies, backup files, etc. I have a laptop, phone, and mp3 player and currently use synching to sync all of my files across all three devices. This works great, I love how seamless, cheap, and automatic everything is. But I want to expand my storage abilities and include a backup that isn’t with me / in my apartment. I was thinking of getting a couple raspberry pis with m.2 ssds, one to leave at my sisters house (small and unobtrusive little plastic box connected to power and her wifi) and then one at my apartment to act as another node, freeing up space on my phone so that all my files are in at least 3 different devices (3:2:1 rule?). this feels like an fairly easy project to set up, but I have a feeling there is probably a better way to go about what I’m trying to achieve.
If you’re going for reliability, and you just want things to be simple, you probably just want to spend the money on two cheap NAS boxes, honestly. There are some caveats that come with RPi’s, and you’re unfamiliar it’s: 1) going to cost about the same, 2) be simpler to manage and upgrade, and 3) be easier to repair disk columes when the time comes.
Even if you’re just looking to make these redundant to each other, just make it simple and easy.