📘 Volume 2 — Family NAS
Make it useful. The volume that turns infrastructure into a household service.
Volume 1's foundation is in place: pool, datasets, users, shares, snapshots. The NAS works. Now the question becomes: how does the family actually live with it? This volume answers that.
What this volume covers
Volume 1 built the foundation. Volume 2 builds the experience. The family doesn't care about RAIDZ2 or snapshots; they care about whether the photos are easy to find and whether they can watch a movie on the TV without hassle. This volume covers:
- The family as a system — designing for actual human behavior, not the perfect user
- Photos: Immich, albums, sharing, backup
- Videos: Jellyfin, transcoding, mobile streaming
- Documents: Paperless-ngx, scanning, OCR, search
- Mobile uploads: the patterns and tradeoffs
- Family calendar and contacts: Nextcloud, CardDAV, CalDAV
- Extending to friends: how to safely add non-family users
Chapters
📖 Ch 01 · The Family as a System
Designing for the people who will use the NAS, including the ones who don't want to learn Linux. The principles that make the family actually use the system.
8 min read📖 Ch 02 · Photos
Immich, the family photo library, face recognition, albums, sharing, the migration from Google Photos or iCloud.
15 min read📖 Ch 03 · Videos & Jellyfin
Media server, transcoding, mobile streaming, hardware transcoding, library organization, hardware-accelerated decoding.
15 min read📖 Ch 04 · Documents & Paperless
Paperless-ngx, OCR, auto-tagging, the consume folder, manual scans, search across years of paper.
12 min read📖 Ch 05 · Mobile Uploads
The three patterns: auto-upload (Immich), landing zone (PhoneUploads dataset), and manual. Pros, cons, the bandwidth question.
10 min read📖 Ch 06 · Calendar & Contacts
Nextcloud, shared family calendar, contacts sync, CalDAV/CardDAV, replacing Google Calendar without losing the family coordination.
12 min read📖 Ch 07 · Extending to Friends
When a friend needs access: account creation, scope-limited shares, time-limited access, the "right way" to share without compromising the family.
10 min readWhat you'll know by the end
- How to set up Immich so the whole family uses it without thinking
- How to stream media to any device in the house without buffering
- How to scan and find any document from the last decade
- How to extend the NAS to friends and extended family safely
- How to keep the system running smoothly for years
The biggest mistake when adding apps to a family NAS is installing them because they're cool. The right test is: "Will the family actually use this, or will it be a thing I set up and then check on in 6 months?" The chapters in this volume only cover apps that have passed that test in real families.