Building a Home Personal Cloud on 2026 Hardware for About $332 Upfront

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A writer who once paid $120 a year for Dropbox now runs 16 TB of personal cloud storage at roughly $25 a year in electricity. The build uses a Beelink N100 mini PC, two 8 TB NAS-grade drives in a ZFS mirror, a UPS battery backup, and a microSD boot drive, totaling about $332 upfront. The author explains why they chose this over a Synology NAS, citing cost, the locked-in operating system, and a desire to learn the underlying Linux stack. Key lessons include using NAS drives rather than desktop drives, which failed after 14 months, and buying a UPS after a power blip corrupted the ZFS pool. The software stack includes Ubuntu, Nextcloud for WebDAV access, ScsDriver to mount storage as a Windows drive, and Tailscale for secure remote access.

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