A few years ago my Dad bought my mom a NAS (a QNAP TS-251B-4G-US) for backing up her photos to. I set it up and maintained it, but it would constantly have problems. In the meanwhile I ended up buying an old Dell R710 to play with in my dorm room. When we started running out of room on my Mom’s NAS, I recommended upgrading to a homebuilt server and my dad agreed. From there we chose what components would best fit this use case, and build it. Using my knowledge from running my R710, I installed UnRaid, and set it up to interface to her computer. With this new server, maintenance has become much easier, with fewer errors, and more frequent software updates. Instead of having to log in to update or fix the NAS, I now rarely have to log in, and am even able to get error messages sent straight to my Phone. In addition, we now have more redundancy as any drive can fail, and the data on the server is still safe (although we do keep remote backups, it’s easier to work with the local copy). Overall this has greatly improved my parents experience using a personal server for backups, simplifying their process and allowing them to back up their files more easily, and thus more frequently. It has also reduced my workload, allowing me to more easily see errors, fixing them before they become problems.