The family server
I built myself.
The NAS started the way most of the best things in this portfolio did: not with a plan, but with a problem that was too obvious to ignore.
My family's data was scattered. Phone backups on random devices. Photos without dates, without organisation, many without metadata — impossible to sort automatically. My dad had an old movie collection and a music library that had been accumulating for decades, sitting on ageing drives that were one bad day away from being gone forever. My family's memories, essentially. I did not want any of it to disappear because nobody had ever built a proper home for it.
So I built one. I planned, sourced, and assembled a personal NAS — a network-attached storage server that runs 24/7 at home. It holds our family's complete photo archive, all backed-up device data, my father's old movie collection and music library (all legally owned), and my own personal digital library of books, research papers, and technical documentation. Everything is organised, redundant, and accessible to the right people from anywhere in the house.
The photo organisation alone took an enormous amount of time. Most of the family photos did not have usable metadata — no timestamps, no location data, nothing to sort by automatically. I went through thousands of them manually, creating a folder structure by date that actually made sense, so that anyone in the family could find a photo from a specific year or event without scrolling through thousands of unsorted files. That is not glamorous work. It is exactly the kind of sustained, unglamorous effort that separates a project from a finished one.
Running the NAS also means understanding the infrastructure: RAID configuration, network access controls, secure remote access, backup scheduling, disk health monitoring, and debugging whatever breaks at 11pm. Every one of those is a real systems administration skill — learned not from a textbook but from the immediate consequence of getting it wrong.
- Planned, sourced, assembled, and configured a personal NAS from scratch — hardware selection through software setup
- Stores complete family photo archive, all device backups, dad's old movie collection and music library (legally owned)
- Manually sorted thousands of family photos by date into a usable folder structure — most had no metadata to automate from
- Manages all family data: backups, pictures, media — the family data manager
- Hosts a personal digital library: books, research papers, and technical documentation I actually read
- Configured RAID, network shares, secure remote access, backup schedules, and disk health monitoring
- Runs 24/7 — all maintenance, debugging, and operational decisions handled independently
Thousands of photos. No metadata. Sorted manually.
The hardest part of the NAS project was not the networking or the RAID configuration — it was sitting down with thousands of unsorted family photos that had no timestamps and organising them by date, one by one, into a structure that actually made sense. Most people outsource the tedious work or leave it undone. The willingness to do it anyway — carefully, completely — is the same quality that keeps Battery Bin running and Hardware Decoded alive after two server raids. It is not exciting. It is the thing that makes everything else work.
Family data manager · Photo archiving · Manual organisation · 24/7 uptime · Grade 12Dad's old movies and music — preserved
My father's movie collection and music library — accumulated over decades, all legally owned — digitised, organised, and stored on the NAS. Things that could have been lost to ageing drives are now backed up, accessible, and going nowhere.
Complete family photo library — organised by date
Thousands of family photos — many with no metadata — manually sorted into a date-based folder structure. Years of family memories, now findable. This took a long time. It was worth it.
RAID, backups, secure access
Configured RAID for redundancy, network shares for family access, secure remote access for use outside the home, and automated backup schedules. Disk health monitored. Issues debugged independently when they arise.
Self-hosted digital library
Books, research papers, and technical documentation that actually get read — self-hosted, organised, and accessible. Curated deliberately rather than accumulated randomly.
Hardware 2
Hardware 3
Hardware 4