PiVPN and "NAS" on Pi Zero 2 W

[RougeEric]

Hi everyone,

I'm about to embark on my first ever Raspberry Pi adventure to set up a VPN at home using Raspberry Pi and PiVPN on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W.
There are a ton of guides out there on how to do that, so I'm pretty confident about getting it to work… I'm not familiar with PiOS or Linux, but I tend to learn fast when it comes to those things.

This said, I was also thinking of attaching some external hard drive to the Pi to set up as a NAS that I could access both locally (home network) and through the VPN on Windows machines. I'm fairly certain that this is possible, but a few questions came to mind and I thought people here could help me out before I go down the rabbit hole:

• Is the Pi Zero 2 W going to be enough to handle PiVPN and the storage sharing? The storage is mostly for backups and some file browsing, so nothing too strenuous data-wise.
  If not, is there some other alternative you would recommend?
• Could PiVPN cause some sort of issue with the networking setup, preventing me from making the storage available on the network?
• Is it easy

enough to make the storage accessible through my network? I'm guessing there is some way to do this built into PiOS, or do you have some easy+reliable software to recommend for this?[/list]

Also, is there anything I might not have thought of to look out for here? =)

[thagrol]

Is it easy enough to make the storage accessible through my network? I'm guessing there is some way to do this built into PiOS, or do you have some easy+reliable software to recommend for this?

Yes. See Building A Pi Based NAS

Full disclosure: shameless self promotion. I wrote that.

[RougeEric]

Yes. See Building A Pi Based NAS

Full disclosure: shameless self promotion. I wrote that.

Ah, nice! Thanks. Looks a bit involved, but O was sort of expecting that. I guess I'll first get the VPN side of things running and look this up later...

[thagrol]

Yes. See Building A Pi Based NAS

Full disclosure: shameless self promotion. I wrote that.

Ah, nice! Thanks. Looks a bit involved, but O was sort of expecting that. I guess I'll first get the VPN side of things running and look this up later...

It doesn't have to be. Dependsing on your needs you can stop after section 3 or section 5.