I have 3 NAS systems based on Freebsd + ZFS where all system are over 10 years old on 3 different locations. My home, my parents home, and at my co-location.
It is just ZFS snapshots with replication. I wrote my own shell scripts for this that takes daily/hourly snapshots. This scales well with multiple TB's, bandwidth is no issue as only changes from last snapshot(s) are replicated.
After 10 years, I've replaced only 2 hard drives of about 30. I do upgrade FreeBSD once every second or third year. Nothing else, it just keeps going.
This project has probably costed me max a week in configuration & setup & maintenance over the 10 years.
With the electricity, hardware, space, and time cost it might be cheaper to have just one and sync to a hosted ZFS service. Of course, those didn't exist 10 years ago, I don't think.
Not really, space has been free for me. Electricity is very cheap usually here in Norway. And hardware are used servers from Ebay. Though these are actually desktop AMD x2 with 8GB ddr2 ECC memory on Asus motherboards. Still working fine, but I am planning to replace soon.
My problem with this approach, and many of the other ones (including my own, at the moment), is that 99% of my relatives wouldn't know how to access such a system in case of death or emergency. This is why the trustee for post-life access to my info is actually a friend who works in IT like me; but I've not sorted out pics yet.
This is a problem I'm trying to solve as well. My main repository is ZFS, which IMO is a no-go for postmortem access. I don't trust that online accounts, especially paid ones, will not be locked out due to inactivity or lack of payment. It may be several years between departure and access.
I have 3 separate use cases: casual access to shared memories for which I'm the family steward (photos, videos), motivated access to personal important documents, and motivated access to other personal files.
I'm not about to leave an unencrypted drive full of personal info in a family member's house, as the risk of theft is strictly greater than just having one copy. My current plan is to use EXT4 + Luks to satisfy the last 2 scenarios, which I think stands a reasonable chance for anyone slightly techy (most modern Linux distributions will simply prompt you for the container password when you try to access the encrypted drive) and is likely to enjoy long-lived support for at least a decade or 2. I have a techy person in my family, not sure I'd do this if I didn't... For casual access to shared memories, I plan on leaving an unencrypted partition. While it lasts, these media are also available on a family-only photo album I put up on AWS.
I'm considering using a laptop as the vessel for the encrypted drive, with a suitable Linux distro pre-loaded and instructions on the desktop/printed out and kept in an adhesive document pocket stuck to the machine.
Currently I run a freedbsd zfs nas as well. I had planned to do something similar but I wanted to allow the places I store backups, some access to the storage. In your example, it would be your parents. I figured it would be a nice way of saying thanks. I was thinking syncthing or something. How do you do NATing?
All servers are behind a NAT, but the servers are only configured with SSH open. With the exception of the NAS I am using which also has NFS, iSCSI running. Also, only the backup servers are allowed to make connections to NAS I am using. The NAS I am using is not allowed to connect to the backup servers.
It is just ZFS snapshots with replication. I wrote my own shell scripts for this that takes daily/hourly snapshots. This scales well with multiple TB's, bandwidth is no issue as only changes from last snapshot(s) are replicated.
After 10 years, I've replaced only 2 hard drives of about 30. I do upgrade FreeBSD once every second or third year. Nothing else, it just keeps going.
This project has probably costed me max a week in configuration & setup & maintenance over the 10 years.