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NAS storage recommendations for storing photos and documents

88 14 November 13, 2023 at 09:09 AM in Request
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Any suggestions or recommendations on NAS storage for personal home use to store photos and documents for family.

Anyone hooked up this to the router and sync the data.

I am thinking of this option instead of cloud storage to avoid monthly/annual costs associated with that.
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fis
06-30-2024 at 02:17 PM.
06-30-2024 at 02:17 PM.
I have used a 4TB NAS for well over a decade. My current NAS is a QNAP 2-disk RAID. It's not hard to set up, and you can do all kinds of things with it beyond file backup, including cloud access. Mine is also a PLEX server so my kids can pull up our home videos on the smart TV.

But there are drawbacks, and when I see people say "It's 2024! Just use the cloud instead!," I wonder if that isn't the better solution, even given the cost.

My first NAS was a Netgear. At one point one of the hard drives failed and as advertised, I was able to swap it out with a new drive and it rebuilt the RAID quickly, with no data lost. But after something like 6 or 8 years it had become a bit obsolete and wasn't getting firmware updates and it wasn't supported by Netgear's latest software and after a while it just crashed and died. The disks were fine, but the NAS was dead and what I didn't expect was that there was no simple or inexpensive way to recover the data without that NAS. I ended up buying the newer QNAP model and new drives, and then went through painful weeks of using Linux data recovery tools to recover the files from the drives that had been in the Netgear RAID. If I did the math on all the time and money spent, I probably would not like the equation.

And of course now I see that QNAP doesn't make this model anymore, and wonder for how many years it will get firmware updates, or whether it will just die one day, and whether I need to just plan to replace them every so many years.
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Last edited by fis June 30, 2024 at 02:19 PM.
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