Backup NAS options

Brody

Good afternoon! Recently my wife moved from an Android phone with expandable storage to an iPhone, and the space constraints became significantly more relevant. I'm looking into options, and some of the language around each type is a little confusing.

WD My Cloud seems pretty easy/cheap, but doesn't offer RAID? and also with everything running through the app, I'm not sure how secure/private it will be? I'm not sure what I have that I actually want to hide from corporate America, but giving up privacy "because I have nothing to hide" is a suckers choice.

Synology DS something or other. More expensive, but has an option for RAID setup (additional cost), also uses an app, I think, so same privacy concerns?

Windows/Linux/raspberry pi self built option. Cheaper (maybe?), more complicated to setup, doesn't have a prebuilt app to facilitate transferring photos, etc?

Mostly it'd be a way to store photos/videos taken on our phones, and hopefully access them without much effort, over the internet? I don't think either have much concern over full backups of our phones/computers. I was trying to search online, but kept getting halfway through an article to discover it's about backing up the NAS, instead of storing backups/data on the NAS.

Six

Yes, this will come down to how much you want to spend and how much work you want to do. I use a synology setup, myself.

Is just paying for iCloud an option?

Gilgaron

For simplicity, iCloud is easy; for on premises then yeah Synology can send your photos and so on to your home server. We moved over to Android from iPhones a while back and use both Google storage and Synology. I used to do an offline backup and optical backup occasionally but not so much with the ever expanding amount of devices laying around.

Brody

Six wrote: »

Yes, this will come down to how much you want to spend and how much work you want to do. I use a synology setup, myself.

Is just paying for iCloud an option?

We could do iCloud, I just wanted to get an idea of what the cost of the backup that we can both use, and also I hate paying monthly for services, even though in this instance it would probably take forever for the NAS solution to become the more cost effective answer.

Edit: I guess also recently I've just become much more hesitant about just handing all of my data over to corporate entities.

Nova_C

I'm using a Raspberry Pi with a USB drive attached as a NAS, but having that gives me the freedom to use the Pi as a resource for other things. Like hosting a Plex server, for example, or Pi-hole.

It's actually pretty great to have, if you have the time, patience, and willingness to do so. Obviously a cloud based service is much easer, but now my entire media library is available to me everywhere and I no longer have to subscribe to various services to stream movies. I'm back buying Blu-rays, but honestly, subscription services have become less than convenient.

Anyway, it's something to consider if you go that route - that a home server based option opens doors to other things.

DevoutlyApathetic

The big thing with Pi right now would be sourcing one. They are out of stock or going for multiples of their normal price everywhere.

Unknown

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