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.

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

I have that exact terramaster for sale. It would work with smb/nfs/iscsi.

Other options using your existing hardware.

• longhorn (rancher)
• ceph