dev_all_the_ops

Port forwarding will work, but it has major downsides

1. Will draw attention of bots
2. Secure as long as there are no security holes in openssh (which is rare but has happened)
3. You _must_ harden the ssh server by disabling password auth, putting behind fail2ban

There are far better and safer alternatives that I would recommend over exposing a raw port to the world.

1. Tailscale
2. Wireguard/OpenVPN

8gb is bare minimum for ZFS. 32gb would be great. ZFS will use all of it.

I would use a minimum of 3 drives because then it is easy to expand later (opposed to starting with 1 or 2).

You could start with the 16tb drives if you want. Personally I like to save power and every spinning drive takes 5-15 watts of power.

What do you mean the addresses are private? Are you double NAT-ed?

As others have mentioned, tailscale or Cloudflare tunnels can solve your problem

Do you care about power consumption?

If not, grab a used Xeon workstation off eBay or Facebook. Grab a pci HBA card and you are set. Note that TrueNas needs lots of ram.

Personally, I wouldn’t want to pay power for an empty drive, so I’d setup the 3 12x drives in a zfs pool and store/sell the 16g drives until you actually need them.

Use Samba.

If you want a GUI for samba on ubuntu checkout

- casaos

- open media vault

CasaOS is about as easy as it gets.

curl -fsSL https://get.casaos.io | sudo bash  

It provides a gui front end for docker. You can install it on any debian based system (which mint is). Combine that with the portainer app and there isn't much you can't do.

All the major NAS brands have a google cloud sync (synology/QNAP/asusstor/casaos)

Owncloud/Nextcloud have a google drive sync plugin

You could use something like rsync to copy to another cloud or drive.

• CasaOs
• Cosmos-server

Or proxmox and then you can run one or the other or both virtually.

This video by Wolfgang has tons of good information on finding a good low power cpu.

There is a google sheet pinned at the top where people have real world power measurements.

Basically you want to find a low TDP cpu/motherboard combo.

Why not both?

I run CasaOS inside Proxmox

1. You could add more with a usb/thunderbolt/sas jbod expansion.

2. Buy a bigger unit, transfer the drives and sell the old one

3. Clustering/hyperconverged with truenas or ceph

Instead of 3 small drives, why not go for 2 larger drives. You are sort of fighting 2 constraints. That case isn’t meant for 3 drives.

Also I really think you will regret the usb. You could get a pci to SATA connector and put 1 or 2 drives inside the case.