I made an account just for this as a lurker because I'm excited to share!

My goal was encrypted offsite backup for critical stuff and photos, local redundancy for everything, not exposing my local machines to the internet, and most importantly that my wife can use this without understanding it or learning new software.

I have an old microatx desktop ("NAS") repurposed in a large tower case with a PCIE SATA card that runs zraid2 with 6x4TB drives. I rent a VPS in a Canadian datacentre for ~$150cdn/year for offsite backup. I try to treat our laptops/desktops as replaceable appliances in that they have no important data on them and image them when they're setup.

Each computer has three network shares:
- M:\ for multimedia on NAS,
- O:\ for photos on NAS (in retrospect P:\ would have been more logical),
- T:\ for documents (VPS via seadrive as detailed below).

Nothing that matters is saved anywhere else. I moved my wife's laptop photos music documents folders to appropriate locations on the NAS.

For documents: I run seafile-pro on the VPS (free license) and the seadrive client on our computers. Task scheduler runs subst on login so that T:\ points to the libraries folder. This way our laptops can access documents from anywhere at T:\. I set up the library hierarchy, e.g. Name, Finances, Work, etc. Libraries are encrypted on the VPS. She has no idea what the backend is or how to access it but if needed I can get to file history, trash, and sharing over internet. (Note encryption disables full text search via the web interface.)

My NAS also runs a seafile-pro but in a realtime backup mode. It can seamlessly become the primary server with minimal effort and a DNS change. The NAS also pulls a nightly copy of the sql db + storage files off the VPS over sshfs just in case. Finally, the seadrive client on our machines is also set to cache a copy of most libraries as a last ditch backup effort.

For photos: It's all under O:\ in \year\description\ if sorted or \Phones\name\DCIM\. Both phones have FolderSync Pro copy DCIM & a few other folders nightly into a O:\Phones\name\DCIM\YYYMMDD\ type structure if on home wifi. I found out the hard way we never save phone photos so set this up. We can sort later if needed. Cron schedules an encrypted borg backup weekly over sshfs to the VPS. I've tested mounting/recovering this and left printed instructions + password on accessing it with family in case something were to happen to me as these are important.

For general multimedia: I don't care if I lose it. It local on the NAS with ZFS to tolerate drive failures. I can VPN home if travelling.

For archiving paper documents: I break this out separately as I've been trying to go fully paperless. I'm a physician and last year around tax time I had an inch of paper to give my accountant. The printer/scanner has a scan button. I rigged it to send to paperless-ng which is running on the NAS using brscan and a script to handle 2-sided+PDF+OCR. My wife knows how to push the button and navigate a couple scanner menus. She can also save documents to O:\Add to Paperless which is pinned in Quick Access and knows about Print To PDF. I also setup scan@ourdomain if I need it. I setup the correspondents/tags/categories and expected to have to do all it but she figured out quickly how to use the interface via browser after seeing me go through it with the existing tags. This is a recent addition so it's just backed up with the photos borg backup script. I'm still thinking on how to best integrate it into seafile but it works.

For contacts/sharing calendar: I run nextcloud on the VPS. From her point of view her phone and laptop's emclient and can see and edit my calendar. The VPS pulls a nightly database + copy of /home/nextcloud for backup although admittedly I haven't tested restoring this backup.

There are a couple other fun things like mosquito+owntracks for self hosted location sharing and we share a keepass db via seafile's webdav. Unrelated I also set up a both@ourdomain email which has been great for for shared accounts, shopping, and bills... highly recommended.

I've been tinkering with this for a decade and I'm very happy with it. I started with a 4-bay qnap but found it too restrictive. Since I've moved (a new set of) drives once from a 2u server that died and just today had to resliver my first faulted drive all without data loss.

Hopefully this inspires someone to roll their own!