Cross posted from https://piefed.social/c/selfhosted/p/1869119/advice-on-swapping-from-synology-to-a-ugreen

I've been using a two-bay Synology nas for the last couple of years with 2x 8TB drives and a stupidly large media collection. I recently acquired a four-bay ugreen nas but don't have any drives for it yet because fuck you AI.

Since I need to have all the same drive size for raid, I was thinking of getting larger disks and taking out a second mortgage. Like start with 2x 12TB and some day add two more. If I do that, I'll have 2x 8TB that wouldn't be useful without keeping the Synology running, and I don't really need both.

The other idea was buying two more 8TB for the new nas, copying the media over, and then moving the two over to make four and decommission the Synology.

I am not well versed in raid, so there easily could be something I'm not considering or a way I should do this to make my life easier.

Also, any advice on how one normally keeps backups with such a large amount of data. I know raid ≠ backup, but right now I'm just praying to the tech gods that the disks keep spinning. I know others out there have large media collections… what do you do?

Most people with media collections use unraid or truenas, not an off the shelf nas. You can build an unraid server with almost anything. My unraid server has 27TB and that’s quite small in the community from what I have heard.

What do you do for backup?

Well for things that aren’t my media collection (why would I care about a bunch of movies I can redownload at any time?) I use restic to Wasabi. I also have a secondary backup using the backblaze docker container which keeps prices very cheap.