owenfromcanada

Oh honey, have you heard of a little country called the U S of A? There are folks in some southern states that would eat one of those for breakfast.

I'm sure all of that is going to hard-working people and humane care for the imprisoned, totally not being siphoned into some rich dude's pocket.

Strong 7 over here

It was a test shot, they probably just found a landlord or something.

Related xkcd:

The answer also depends on your level of experience and how much you want to learn doing this. You mentioned you haven't done this before, but are you otherwise comfortable using computers and figuring things out? Are you familiar with Linux and/or the command line? In addition, are you hoping to tinker around and learn a lot from this, or are you more concerned with just setting it up so you can use it?

There are options for all levels of expertise and technical interest, but I recommend starting with any hardware you already have or can aquire for cheap/free (especially if you're hoping to tinker and learn more). As another commenter suggested, finding an old desktop or laptop and putting a NAS operating system on it would be a great starting project. Then once you play around with it, you'll know if/where you want to spend some cash on something better. If you don't have old PCs laying around, check on whatever you use for local buy & sell listings, you can probably pick up something for pretty cheap.

If you're mostly looking to play around and you don't have any extra hardware, you can also try things out in a virtual machine (download VirtualBox), which will let you learn without any monetary investment.

Did you expect them to get it right the first time?

Thousands of years after humanity has destroyed itself with nuclear weapons...

As the sun peeks through the gray clouds and lights up a solar panel...

A long-forgotten server hums to life...

And sends an email...

"Attention Required: Your Order is Delayed"

Fair enough!

Related:

Congrats on finding what is possibly the douchiest shirt of all time! Wear it with a mix of pride and shame!