I haven’t tried syncthing yet, but might be able to combine it with some of these ideas.

I’m currently doing phone backups to a samba smb server with an app called smbsync2 from fdroid. It can copy or move files and directories from and to a smb share on a schedule. An option for desktop would be rsync.

To get the archiving functionality you can do automatic ZFS snapshots. You can restore the entire snapshot or mount it via the terminal, or samba apparenly has a feature to display files from snapshots as shadow copies on windows.

There is one limitation of this is, if a client deletes a file on the local storage, the file on the server doesn’t get deleted automaticly.

You can take a look at mikrotik, their switches are really cheap and some of them are even layer 3, but I don’t know about their availability in the US.

I don’t have one yet, but their 4 port 100 gig switch looks verry tempting.

10 gig sfp+ isnt that expensive or power hungry anymore. You can get a new switch for ~100$ now. A complete 2.5 gig network is probably more expensive as you can’t really get used nics.

10 gig sfp+ isnt that expensive or power hungry anymore. You can get a new switch for ~100$ now. A complete 2.5 gig network is probably more expensive as you can’t really get used nics.