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Plenty of FOSS ways to set up a NAS. I'm going for Debian with ZFS myself, I prefer custom solutions as they are almost always more flexible than "NAS OS:es".
What software do you need when using debian? Just ZFS as a file system?
It depends on what your goals are of course, but I use ZFS for the file system, sanoid to take snapshots on a schedule (hourly saved for a few days, daily saved for 1-2 weeks and so on up to monthly saved a year or two), Samba to actually share the files to Windows computers, Plex to share media to my TV.
Also rsync to a second (offsite) computer for replication/backups of the most important stuff. That computer also takes ZFS snapshots to get easy versioning of the files.
I wouldn't recommend it for most people, but it's nice if you're comfortable working with Linux to begin with.
Is there good FOSS software that you can run on debian or ubuntu that can allow you to access your files using SFTP while the files are being stored with a RAID system? And is it possible to have your files store older versions of the file when you overwrite them and keep these older versions of the file for X months?
Yes, that shouldn't be an issue. I believe SFTP would be supported basically out-of-the-box if you install OpenSSH during the install, but you might want to create a group and configure access if you're not the only user.
The version thing is what I'm doing with ZFS (also works with BtrFS, but it doesn't feel as reliable yet). Basically I take snapshots every hour, and the entire state of the filesystem at that point becomes frozen in time, and can be accessed as long as the snapshots exists.
sanoid automates the process and cleans up so that there's a reasonable amount of snapshots, not hundreds or thousands.
Of course, this means that you can't really regain any space when you delete things, until the oldest snapshot containing the data is deleted.