The 2TB SSD that I’ve been using as a Time Machine ran out of space a couple of weeks ago, and my laptop’s storage is about to run out due to the ever-increasing size of my photo catalog (which is responsible for 72% of my storage 😬).
My friends are talking about network-attached storage and Tailscale and other sicko stuff, but I have just wanted a humble desktop-attached storage (DAS) for some extra space.
I’m using a QNAP TR-004 and a couple of used 12 TB drives. There was plenty of availability on the used market for 12TB drives, and they worked out to $14.6/TB. They’re set up in RAID 1 right now, and I plan to migrate them to RAID 5 when I run out of storage. This means that stuff I put on the QNAP volume gets copied to both drives. There will still be a copy of things if one drive fails.
It’s pretty small on my desk.1 It couldn’t be much smaller than the physical volume of the four 3.5" drives it can take. Marsh’s clicker for scale.
I’m using restic as a replacement for Time Machine. This lets me have all my backups in a folder on the QNAP volume without making a separate partition for the Time Machine. This DAS setup allows my Backblaze account to backup the QNAP volume (excluding the redundant restic backups) without paying for additional cloud storage.
A big portion of my Capture One catalog is the Trash collection. I put all its contents into a new album and then exported it to the QNAP volume as a new managed catalog. Then I could delete the contents of the Trash collection in my main catalog and now my laptop has a lot more space on it again.
And kind of cute but sort of in a r/malelivingspace way and that’s sort of cursed. ↩︎