Same here. I ordered some KN95 masks during the pandemic that came with a fake certification from ICR Polska (ICR Polska is legit; the manufacturer faked the cert). Since it was “sold by Newegg” and not some third-party seller, I thought it was pretty reasonable for me to ask for a refund.

Newegg told me to pound sand.

Then American Express told Newegg to pound sand.

That was the last time I ordered from them.

I built my first TrueNAS box using new old stock drives from eBay. Immediately after they arrived I learned SMART can be wiped, so I carefully inspected the drives for physical signs of use. Fingerprints, scuff marks, wear in the screw holes, insertion marks on the pins, that kind of stuff. They had none of those, fortunately, but the sealed anti-static bag had some weird half-English instructions that seemed extremely subpar for Western Digital.

So after careful inspection, all I could really guarantee was … nothing. They appeared to be unused and the SMART was cleared. So far they’ve worked well.

But I just didn’t sleep well trusting my data to them, so I purchased a set of new drives this week. These old drives are going into a tertiary local backup DAS where they’ll be a last resort after my main external drive and cloud backups. They won’t be a total loss, but I also won’t be relying on them for anything.

I personally have had good luck with NOS drives from eBay. Not going to spam the seller here and it’s possible that I’ve just received wiped drives that went through a SMART reset. But they show zero signs of physical wear, even inside the screw holes.

My budget allows for new now so I no longer have to rely on discount NOS. But it’s an option for someone on an extreme budget.

You can throw them in an off-the-shelf NAS, or build your own using something like Unraid or TrueNAS. I use TrueNAS and it works great for me but the learning curve may be steep for some. Both TrueNAS and Unraid work well on old hardware so if you’ve got that old first-gen i3 from 15 years ago, it will be more than enough horsepower to run the NAS.

I use cloud storage for most of my documents. My NAS runs a daily job to pull down any updates. Once a month it encrypts everything and sends it up to B2. I definitely have room for improvement there and need to look at moving to daily differentials or incrementals. I’m also probably moving to glacier, unless B2 comes up with something comparable.

The only thing I do locally is video editing, because pushing lots of 4K over my 300/300 FIOS connection is an exercise in extreme patience. But once I’m done, I back that up to the NAS. From there a separate job encrypts and backs it up to B2.

So if my Windows drive got obliterated today, I wouldn’t lose anything worth saving. I’d just have to deal with a reinstall.

AWS is not a consumer tool, it’s an enterprise tool. I work with AWS in my day to day, so I had no problem quickly hacking together some scripts to upload my data, even if it wasn’t the most elegant setup. But some of the comments on my original post were saying that they would be interested in S3, but didn’t know where to start. Uploading in bulk to glacier requires at a bare minimum, familiarity with the CLI, but more likely it requires coding knowledge and familiarity with the AWS SDK.

Someone chime in if I’m mistaken, but I know platforms like TrueNAS and QNAP QTS (and presumably the OSes from Synology, Asustor, and TerraMaster) have built-in functionality for automatically uploading folders or datasets to B2 / S3 / etc. At least on TrueNAS and QNAP, you just give it credentials, point to a bucket, and go.

It’s great that you’re doing this but are you focusing more on people trying to DIY a solution? Or are you saying what you’ve put together is better than what TrueNAS et al have built in?

I remember my friend in high school buying a 1 GB drive (not a typo) for $400 at a computer show. Our minds were blown.

I’m in a similar boat. My F4-423 will be here today and I’m probably not even going to bother with TOS. I’m going with TrueNAS instead. Unraid is also a possibility. Both are excellent, mature platforms. For most of the people most of the time, you can’t go wrong either way.

TOS has had too many security issues over the last few years. Some of them are severe, like revealing the root password or automatically opening up SSH to the internet. In defense of TerraMaster, they aren’t the only ones; QNAP had a backdoor for a long time as well. My problem is that if a company thinks these are good ideas, their overall security hygiene probably isn’t great. I want to allow outbound internet access from my NAS so I can fetch backups of OneDrive and back itself up to B2 or S3 Glacier, so who knows what it’s ingesting when it calls home for updates.

My suggestion would be to tool around with Unraid, then tool around with TrueNAS. Maybe even look at OpenMediaVault. If they meet your needs, then they’re probably a better choice overall.