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Jason Fitzpatrick is the former Editor-in-Chief of How-To Geek. He oversaw the day-to-day operations of the site to ensure readers have the most up-to-date information on everything from operating systems to gadgets.

Prior to his current role, Jason spent several years as Editor-in-Chief of LifeSavvy, How-To Geek's sister site focused on tips, tricks, and advice on everything from kitchen gadgets to home improvement. Prior to that, he was the Founding Editor of Review Geek. Jason has over a decade of experience in publishing and has penned thousands of articles during his time at LifeSavvy, Review Geek, How-To Geek, and Lifehacker.

He's been in love with technology since his earliest memories of writing simple computer programs with his grandfather, but his tech writing career took shape back in 2007 when he joined the Lifehacker team as their very first intern. After cutting his teeth on tech writing at Lifehacker and working his way up, he left as Weekend Editor and transferred over to How-To Geek in 2010.

With years of awesome fun, writing, and hardware-modding antics at How-To Geek under his belt, Jason helped launch How-To Geek's sister site Review Geek in 2017. In 2019, he stepped back from his role at Review Geek to focus all his energy on LifeSavvy. In 2022, he returned to How-To Geek to focus on one of his biggest tech passions: smart home and home automation. In 2023, he assumed the role of Editor-in-Chief.

In addition to the long run as a tech writer and editor, Jason spent over a decade as a college instructor doing his best to teach a generation of English students that there's more to success than putting your pants on one leg at a time and writing five-paragraph essays. While his days of steering students toward greatness are behind him, his lifelong desire to delight, entertain, and inform lives on in his work at How-To Geek.

If you're looking for him after hours, he's probably four search queries and twenty obscenities deep in a DIY project or entranced by the limitless exploration possibilities of some open-world game or another. He loves long walks on virtual beaches, playing worker placement board games with inconsequential themes, and spending time with his family and menagerie of pets and plants.

Mix together one Raspberry Pi and a sprinkle of cheap external hard drives and you have the recipe for an ultra-low-power and always-on network storage device. Read on as we show you how to set up your own Pi-based NAS.

Why Do I Want to Do This?

Our office server, for example, runs 24/7 and consumes almost $200 worth of power a year. A Raspberry Pi-based network storage device on the other hand, consumes about $5 worth of power per year.

We'll be the first to grant you that a full fledged server is going to have more storage space and the capability to do more work (such as transcoding a multi-terabyte video collection in a reasonable span of time). For most people, however, the principle purpose of having an always-on computer somewhere in the house is to serve as a file server and file backup repository. For such tasks the Raspberry Pi is more than powerful enough and will save you a chunk of change in power use.

What Do I Need?

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This tutorial builds on our previous tutorial: The HTG Guide to Getting Started with Raspberry Pi and we'll assume you've already completed that---in other words you already have your Raspberry Pi, got it powered up, hooked to a mouse and keyboard, and you've installed Raspbian on it.

In addition to the gear you'll need from the Getting Started with Raspberry Pi tutorial, you'll only the following hardware:

  • One (at minimum) USB external hard drive for simple network backups and file serving

or

  • Two (at minimum) USB external hard drives for local data redundancy

You can use any external hard drives you have on hand but it's ideal to use small low-power drives if possible since the whole theme of the project is to set up a tiny and low-power NAS you can just tuck out of the way and forget about.

Before we continue, there are a couple design choices we made in terms of how we're configuring our Raspberry Pi NAS that you should be aware of. While most users will want to follow along exactly as we've done it, you may wish to tweak specific steps to better fit your needs and how you use the computers on your network.

First, we're using NTFS-formatted hard disks. Should the Raspberry Pi NAS fail for some reason or we want to quickly copy information over a USB 3.0 connection instead of via the network, having NTFS-formatted disks makes it dead simple to take the portable USB drives we're using on the NAS build and plug them right into one of the many Windows machines we use every day.

Preparing for and Mounting the External Hard Drives

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Once you have gathered up the hardware, followed along with the Getting Started with Raspberry Pi tutorial to get up to speed (and are running Raspian) it's time to start setting up your Pi as a NAS.

The first order of business is to hook up the hard drives to the Raspberry Pi (or the attached USB hub depending on your configuration and whether or not the hard drives are self-powered or externally powered). Once the hard drives are attached and the Pi is powered up it's time to get working.

Note: We're using two hard drives. If you have decided to only use one hard drive simply disregard all the commands in this section intended to mount/modify or otherwise interact with the second hard drive.

We're going to be doing all of our work within the terminal. As such you can either work directly at your Raspberry Pi using LXTerminal in Raspian or you can SSH into your Raspberry Pi using a tool like Putty. Either way is fine.

Once you're at the command line the first thing you need to do is to add in support to Rasbian for NTFS-formatted disks. To do so type the following command:

sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g
sudo fdisk -l

At minimum you should see two disks, if you've added in a secondary disk for data mirroring (as we have) you should see three like so:

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The first disk 

/dev/mmcb1k0

is the SD card inside the Raspberry Pi that houses our installation of Raspbian. We're going to leave that one completely alone.

The second disk, 

/dev/sda

is our first 1TB external hard drive. The third disk, 

/dev/sdb

is our second 1TB external hard disk. The actual partitions we're interested in on these two disks are 

/sda1/

and 

/sdb1/

, respectively. Make a note of the hard drive names.

Before we can mount the drives, we need to create a directory to mount the drives to. For the sake of simplicity we're going to simply make directory called USBHDD1 and USBHDD2 for each drive. First we have to make the drives. At the command line enter the following commands:

sudo mkdir /media/USBHDD1

sudo mkdir /media/USBHDD2

After you've created the two directories, it's time to mount the external drives to each location. Again at the command line enter the following commands:

sudo mount -t auto /dev/sda1 /media/USBHDD1

sudo mount -t auto /dev/sdb1 /media/USBHDD2

sudo mkdir /media/USBHDD1/shares

sudo mkdir /media/USBHDD2/shares

Now it's time to install Samba so we can access the storage from elsewhere on the network. At the command line enter:

sudo apt-get install samba samba-common-bin

When prompted to continue type Y and enter. Sit back and relax as everything unpacks and installs. Once the Samba package finishes installing, it's time to do a little configuration. Before we do anything else, let's make a backup copy of the Samba configuration file in case we need to revert to it. At the command line, type the following command line:

sudo cp /etc/samba/smb.conf /etc/samba/smb.conf.old

This simply creates a backup of the configuration file with the filename smb.conf.old and leaves it in the same directory as the original configuration file.

Once we've created the backup it's time to do some basic editing in the Samba config file. Type the following at the command line:

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

This will open the nano text editor and allow us to make some simple changes. If this is your first time using nano, we would strongly suggest checking out The Beginner's Guide to Nano, the Linux Command-Line Text Editor. You should see something like the following in your terminal window:

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The first is the workgroup identifier, by default workgroup = WORKGROUP. If you're using a different name for your home workgroup, go ahead and arrow over to change that now, otherwise leave it as the default.

Our next stop is to turn on user authentication for our samba storage, otherwise anyone with general access to our network (like guest Wi-Fi users) will be able to walk right in. Scroll down in the Samba config file until you get to the section that reads:

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Remove the # symbol from the security = user line (by highlighting it with the cursor and pressing delete) to enable username/password verification for the Samba shares.

Next, we're going to add an entirely new section to the configuration file. Scroll all the way down to the very bottom of the file and enter the following text:

[Backup]
comment = Backup Folder
path = /media/USBHDD1/shares
valid users = @users
force group = users
create mask = 0660
directory mask = 0771
read only = no

Press CTRL+X to exit, press Y when asked if you want to keep changes and overwrite the existing configuration file. When back at the command prompt enter the following command to restart the Samba daemons:

sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart

At this point we need to add in a user that can access the Pi's samba shares. We're going to make an account with the username backups and the password backups4ever. You can make your username and password whatever you wish. To do so type the following commands:

sudo useradd backups -m -G users

sudo passwd backups

You'll be prompted to type in the password twice to confirm. After confirming the password, it's time to add "backups" as a legitimate Samba user. Enter the following command:

sudo smbpasswd -a backups

Enter the password for the backup account when prompted. Once you have created the user account and password you do not need to restart the Samba daemon again as we've already instructed it to be on the lookout for authenticated users. We can now hop onto any Samba-capable machine on our network and test connectivity to the network share.

From a nearby windows machine we opened up the Windows file explorer, clicked on Network, confirmed that the hostname RASPBERRYPI was in the WORKGROUPS workgroup and clicked on the shared folder Backups:

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When prompted, enter the credentials you created in the previous step (if you're following along line for line, the login is backups and the password is backups4ever).

Once your credentials are accepted, you will be treated to an empty folder as there isn't anything in the share yet. To double check everything is working smoothly, let's create a simple file from the computer we tested the connection with (in our case, the Windows 7 desktop). Create a txt file like so:

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Now, from the command line we have been working all this time, let's check to see if the file we created on the Windows desktop appears properly within the share directory we created. At the command line type the following command:

cd /media/USBHDD1/shares

ls

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hello-is-it-me-you-are-looking-for.txt is in the directory; our simple shared directory experiment is a success!

sudo nano /etc/fstab

This will open up the file systems table in nano so we can add a few quick entries. Within the nano editor add the following lines:

/dev/sda1 /media/USBHDD1 auto noatime 0 0

/dev/sda2 /media/USBHDD2 auto noatime 0 0

Press CTRL+X to exit, press Y to save, and overwrite the existing file.

If you're only using a single hard drive for simple network sharing with no redundancy, then that's it! You're all done with the configuration process and can begin enjoying your ultra-low power NAS.

Configuring Your Raspberry Pi NAS for Simple Data Redundancy

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So far our Raspberry Pi NAS is hooked up to the network, file transfer works, but there's one glaring thing missing. That secondary hard drive is configured but sitting entirely idle.

In this section of the tutorial we're going to use two simple but powerful Linux tools, rsync and cron, to configure our Raspberry Pi NAS to perform a nightly data mirror from the /shares/ folder on the primary drive to the /shares/ folder on the secondary drive. This isn't going to be a real time RAID-like data mirroring, but a daily (or semi-daily) data backup to the secondary drive is a great way to add another layer of data security.

At the command line enter the following command:

sudo apt-get install rsync

Once rsync is installed, it's time to set up a cron job to automate the process of copying files from the USBHDD1 to USBHDD2. At the command line enter the following command:

crontab -e

The command will open up your cron scheduling table in the nano text editor which should be rather familiar to you at this point in the tutorial.  Go ahead and scroll down to the bottom of the document and enter the following line:

0 5 * * * rsync -av --delete /media/USBHDD1/shares /media/USBHDD2/shares/

This command specifies that every day at 5:00AM (the 0 5 part), every single day (* * *, wild cards in the year, month, day spots), we want rsync to compare the two directories, copying everything from HDD1 to HDD2 and deleting anything in the backup directory that no longer matches something in the primary directory---i.e. if we have a movie file on HDD1 we delete, we also want that file to be removed from the backup on the next synchronization.

Once you've entered the crontab entry, click CTRL+X to exit and save the file. If you wish to run the rsync immediately to get the data mirrored faster and make the initial cron job a little lighter on the system, go ahead and enter the same rsync command you put into the crontab at the command line like so:

rsync -av --delete /media/USBHDD1/shares /media/USBHDD2/shares/

That's it! All you need to do at this point is check in on your Raspberry Pi in the next day or two to make sure that the scheduled job is firing off as expected and the data from 

/USBHDD1/shares/

is appearing in 

/USBHDD2/shares/

.

From here on out anything you put into your Raspberry Pi-powered NAS will be mirrored daily across both hard drives.

Before we leave the topic completely, here are some additional How-To Geek articles you may wish to check out to add more punch to your new Raspberry Pi-powered NAS: