I'm planning to build another NAS, then pool both NASs together to make one big NAS, as I already simply use mergerfs and snapraid, so it'll be cake to mount NAS 2 to NAS 1, then add it to the mergerfs pool. That probably won't happen for a bit longer. I'm currently at 78TB with a max capacity of 256TB, and generating only about 1-2TB per month.
this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2025
31 points (100.0% liked)
Selfhosted
52735 readers
275 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
and a lot of random external drives
Somehow it rings home :-)
A separate backup NAS would better than nothing. If losing your data would be a disaster, then don't overlook backing up your data in a separate location (either at someone elses house or use a cloud backup provider like Backblaze) incase of a fire, etc.
If your Synology NAS is in Raid, up-sizing your drives is dead simple.
Pop out one of your current, smaller drives. Pop in a new, bigger drive. Wait for Disk Station to migrate data over to the new drive (note that this can literally take days depending how much data there is). Then do the same with the next old, small drive and the next one until all old, small drives are replaced with new, big ones.
This will work as long as your current drives are not like 24 TB or whatever the upper limit is these days. In that case, you need more bays.
After this is done, move all the data from your externals onto your Synology NAS.
I’ve done this many times! A note, for extra carefulness, you can do the long SMART test on the disk before you add it to the array, or do the manufacturers diagnostic suite in it by plugging it into a SATA port on a PC first just to be extra careful, and also make sure there aren’t any firmware updates.
Replace NAS drives with larger ones and then repopulate data from your backup? That way you get to test your recovery and restore procedure at the same time.
what's a backup?
Upsize your NAS drives. Get rid of external drives. Set up one nas to back up to the other, or pay for cloud backups. Synology cloud is relatively cheap.
Cloud or any way to backup your data in another location is greatly preferred to having another NAS in the same location just as a mirrored copy of your first.
Depends a lot on budget, space, and electricity costs. Going to 'overkill' level once can save a lot of these issues down the line.
Mine started similarly, some small box with a couple drives that got up sized and then moved to another to add more...
Eventually I bought a used 2U box with 14 bays and set it up with a ZFS pool all made up of mirrored disk pairs and auto snapshots so it can have a drive fail without issue and go back 2 weeks if something gets oops deleted.
Downside, now the whole lab uses about 700 watts continually so the power bill is kinda nuts.
I have 2 servers. One is used as a NAS and hosted stuff. The other is just for backups. If the space runs out somewhere, it will simply be expanded.