Oh I see, could you please point to that system that

• it is free and not tie to any vendor
• easy to use to the point that my grandma could use it
• properly tested by an active q group
• with safe boundaries
• production ready
• total flexibility
• with a proper wizard / gui that is self explanatory, robust enough to make sure you don’t select contradicting options.

If such system exist perhaps I move my homelab, who knows…

I think you are missing the point how easy is to fuck things up in a console with truenas when trying to activate de duplication or making a backup VS the same thing in a user friendly, already tested private solution. Of course from the noob point of view.

Installing truenas when having no idea about almost anything is cumbersome, dealing with the millions options (some of them incompatible between them) is frustrating, cryptic error codes are discouraging…

You want people jump in? Then make it easy for them, lower the entry barrier, if not, you will find yourself alone in your ivory tower.

The exact same ia true for you synology NAS. + the limitations on how synology thinks you should do backups vs how it actually suits you.

If you already know how to setup a proper backup system, balancing the pros and cons, with a robust and solid way to avoid data loss, then you don’t qualify for noob.

If you don’t know any of that and still makes yiur backup system, that’s the recipe of the disaster and you have real probabilities of losing data with nay option to recover.

I see your point but in this world there is only 2 options, or you have the skills, the knowledge and the time to do it by yourself, or you need to outsource it.

Assuming that the op is a real noob it is clear that the 2 first prerequisites are missing making that option unacceptable, then you can only go to the buy something easy enough for the general public.

And in top of that, in a homelab, the most sacred thing is the data, not the service, the data. If you misconfigure a nas or the automated backup system it could lead into the worst scenario: the data is lost forever.

Weighting everything I still recommend what I did. Although if instead of synology you prefer ugreen or asustor… Well that’s depends of your taste

If you are a real and total noob try to get a synology, ugreen or another reputable brand of nas an start from there.

The point of having one of these is to avoid a big fuck up resulting in a data loss. An from there you will be able to Bild up what you need.

all the best in this journey