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Storage

Disks, pooling, parity, network shares and backups. Building a NAS from plain Debian and a pile of drives, keeping the data on it safe, and sharing it.

Back up before touching disks

Several pages here use commands that erase drives (wipefs, parted, mkfs). Check the device with lsblk -o NAME,SIZE,SERIAL right before you run them, and make sure anything you care about is backed up first.

  • NAS Setup

    Debian 13 NAS: disk layout, MergerFS pool and SnapRAID parity.

  • Disk Management

    Partitioning, formatting, mounting drives, and SMART monitoring with smartd.

  • MergerFS

    Pool multiple drives into a single mount point without striping.

  • SnapRAID

    Snapshot-based parity, automated with snapraid-aio, a dead-man switch and ntfy.

  • Backups

    Borgmatic on every server: append-only peer repos, offsite copy, Borg UI, restore tests.

  • Samba

    The NAS's SMB shares and how to set one up.

  • Mounting NAS shares on a desktop

    CIFS mounts in fstab, credentials file, KDE Dolphin, and options that survive an offline NAS.

  • Samba Quick Reference

    Day-to-day Samba commands, users and share options.