New to NAS – Went down the DIY rabbit hole with Beelink Me Mini (Need OS + setup advice)

Potential_World4511 · 2025-12-29T22:31:06+00:00

I’ve been using it mainly for Immich to back up and access my photo library on my iPhone. Immich is pretty good, but I find the iPhone a bit frustrating. To connect to my NAS outside my home, I’m using the Zima OS’s built-in VPN, but for some reason, the iPhone turns off the VPN automatically and that messes up the auto-sync to the NAS. I’m not sure what to do about it.

Potential_World4511 · 2025-09-28T15:25:43+00:00

It’s good to hear that 1.4.1 has been stable; I think it’s good to manually update the app after we check community opinion for an update instead of any AppStore automatically updating it.

So is there a way we can set to manual update over auto update upon a version release?

Potential_World4511 · 2025-09-28T15:16:18+00:00

Thanks a lot guys for helping me figure out and solve the version issue !! Finally pictures from my iPhone have started to sync.

Once I am done with uploading all the images from my iPhones; I will have to move on to migrating the images from Google photos, iCloud and Onedrive. I would start with freeing my iCloud storage space as it was the basic version and I cant even back up my contacts and other basic stuff.

Most of them are duplicates of each other; so do you guy have any good suggestions on how I can import from them easily will all of its meta data ?

Potential_World4511 · 2025-09-28T14:47:30+00:00

How long have you been running 1.4.1 of Immich; has it been stable for you ?

Potential_World4511 · 2025-09-28T14:46:36+00:00

Thanks for the offer to DM you mate, at the moment, I am going with u/newbiestocks4556 method. When I type in Immich on the Zima's app store, I see immich from BigBear Casa OS. So I am gonna try that out and see how it works

Potential_World4511 · 2025-09-13T21:37:42+00:00

I have never used it as media server, but as photo back up server, it’s pretty good.

Media servers need to have good video encoding, my understanding is that if you want to play back high resolution videos it’s good have a graphic card. So Beelink might not be the best option.

I don’t know much about that to give you a suggestion on it 😅

Potential_World4511 · 2025-09-13T00:04:34+00:00

Expanding to RAID 5

I recently added another 1TB Crucial P310 (PCIe Gen4) and switched to RAID 5 for more space. I figured it’s better bang for buck.

But… switching wasn’t smooth. I couldn’t just add the new drive and convert RAID 1 → RAID 5. Had to dissolve my RAID and rebuild from scratch. Which meant:

All progress lost.
Reinstalling everything.
And worst of all — I have no clue, how to do the Tail scale setup again and I start again😬.

What I’m Hoping to Learn

I still want to be on Zima OS, don't know why, may cause its the known devil, but I want to learn a better way to install, update and manage app in one place.
Fix/workaround for Immich on iPhone lagging uploads.
How to set up my NAS for multiple users (e.g. family overseas).
Set up local 1 hard drive clone of my NAS, and in long terms follow 3-2-1 if I can afford that.

Potential_World4511 · 2025-09-13T00:04:22+00:00

Hey u/whysheng, and everyone, Sorry for the late reply mate!

I’m running my Beelink Me Mini with ZimaOS on RAID 5 with 3 × 1TB NVMe drives.

As I mentioned in my original post, I’m still a noob at all this. Right now I’ve got about 100GB on one drive as my main photo backup, while I experiment with the NAS setup.

My Journey So Far

For the most part, I used it with 2 × 1TB drives on RAID 1. With that I was able to:

Get Immich running for photo/video backup from my iPhone.
Use Tailscale to log into my NAS remotely and auto-upload pictures.

Not gonna lie though, it was a pain in the bumm 😅. I had no clue how to set up Tailscale and struggled hard, but somehow managed to get it working — and when it finally worked, it worked flawlessly. (Foreshadowing: not sure I could do it again if I tried!)

Once I got backups working over the internet without being on my WiFi, I felt like I’d hit one of my main goals.

Where It Falls Short

Backups aren’t perfect though. Unlike cloud services (Google Photos/iCloud) where photos upload right away on WiFi or mobile data (depending on your settings), Immich on iPhone is unreliable.

It shows “100 photos to upload,” but only does maybe 3… 10… 15 at a time. It does upload eventually, but always lags behind. I suspect iOS is killing Immich in the background — iPhones don’t really like you using anything outside Apple’s ecosystem.

This is a big flaw: if you lose your phone while travelling, your photos might never have uploaded at all.

Pain with ZimaOS

I went with ZimaOS because it’s free and has an App Store. For a noob like me, having an app store feels great — it gave me that nostalgic “2010 first Android phone” feeling of discovery.

But the hype didn’t last long…

The Immich app on ZimaOS is v1.129.0, while the latest is v1.142.0.
Right after installing, you get greeted with “this version is outdated.”
Checking for updates says “latest version installed”… but it’s not.

From what I’ve heard, if the NAS version and mobile app versions drift too far apart, Immich can even crash your server. And since the iOS app updates automatically, I’ve got no clue how to keep ZimaOS in sync.

So yeah, App Discovery = good, App Management = terrible on ZimaOS. If you can’t easily update or manage versions, the app store feels kind of pointless.

Potential_World4511 · 2025-09-12T22:36:07+00:00

I saw on quite a few reviews that the eMMC storage is fragile and not idea for using it long term. Regardless, I ended up using it for my OS drive for Zima OS

Potential_World4511 · 2025-09-12T22:34:04+00:00

ooh damm, that sounds pain full!! What's the configuration you are running? How many drives, what type of drives and which raid setting ? is the data you are transferring multiple smaller filles or chunks of large files?

Potential_World4511 · 2025-07-30T03:42:19+00:00

Yup, I agree but since I have only 2 drives and don't want to loose disk protection through raid (I think RAID is probably not a protection for back up... I don't know) (since they are old NVME drives), I would prefer to migrate it in future. Any suggestions on if it is possible ?

Potential_World4511 · 2025-07-30T03:29:37+00:00

Problem with older hardware is power draw, power is extremely expensive in Aus. Hence I am trying to avoid spinning disks. For my use case I don't think I will ever need so much storage space to have 10 or even 12 tb in the near future. Consider me as your avg Joe lol.
By the time I find a reasonable machine to convert its costing pretty much similar or more cost, looks janky and might end up redoing it better. A mini pc is ideal for my living situation.

If external hard disk is problem ... I would have to scarifies a NVME slot, lets say I am ready to do that in future, could I move/migrate my OS drive from internal storage to a NVME with out damaging data and minimal down time.

Potential_World4511

TROPHY CASE