I am a retired electro-mechanical engineer with a C&G 224 qualification in electronics test & service. I have been working with computers since the heady days of the 8 bit home microcomputers like the ZX Spectrum etc.

Most of my PC experience is with DOS & some OS2 Warp and Windows. My first experience with a NAS was a QNAP TS-563D but I wanted an affordable NAS with a better CPU so decided to try out TrueNAS as I had quite a few spare drives doing nothing plus an Intel 8th Gen motherboard with a core I7 8700 cpu and 32GB of memory with 2 free dimm slots. I bought a Node 804 case and 2 more 16GB ram sticks and built my first TrueNAS server.

I have a mirror of my TrueNAS server on a USB3.1 Raid DAS and also on a 16TB WD External drive. Irreplaceable data is also stored on the cloud but hoping to change that to an alternative free solution soon. We all know that RAID is not a backup

As long as I don’t have a catastrophic failure on all 3 copies simultaneously I should be able to recover from any single failure or even 2 of the 3 copies failing.

My TrueNAS knowledge and my knowledge of linux is about the same as my level of rocket science & brain surgery so I am learning as I go. I struggle installing most of the apps but youtube helped me get Plex installed and I have allso installed Handbrake, open speedtest and glances. I would like to install Calibre but tried and couldn’t get it to work.