Big changes in 2021, beyond Linux. Yeah, boy. We're getting serious about computers, man. I shelled out the cash for a network-attached storage (NAS) device, AKA a tiny little cloud that lives in our home. Thrilled with this. Thrilled!
Our use cases
1. Consolidated data backup
Like most people (I assume), we were backing up our data in a number of places:
- External solid state drives for when you're like "okay, I should really back. up. this. computer. I hadn't used my SSD to backup in 700+ days, my Macbook Time Machine helpfully screamed at me. Yeah, manual backing up is hard. Also, the SSDs had random other things we kinda needed but didn't have space to put anywhere else - photos, movies.
- Various big tech cloud services (Google, Dropbox). Automated backing up: so easy! So nice. Not free, of course. And... it's on their servers. Which I have been increasingly uncomfortable with. Stop scanning my loved ones' faces for your machine learning, Google! I knew I wanted to stop trading privacy for convenience.
The NAS offers one big helpful block of storage space. We can backup automatically. We can connect it to a secure (single!) off-site server for one consolidated stream of our crap. Yessss.
2. Media server
I didn't think I'd enjoy this aspect so much but oh boy, have I been enjoying this. I installed Plex on our NAS, uploaded all our old movies and TVs and eeeeeee, now we can actually watch them! And they're beautifully organized! Eeeee. And we can set up user accounts and even, if we're willing to accept the security risk of opening the NAS up to the wild, hairy open internet, we could stream it remotely. Our own private Netflix! Eeeeee. Now I need to rip all our old DVDs and yaaaaas.
3. Photos
I really, really was getting annoyed with how entangled with Google I was getting. And the main entanglement was via photos of loved ones (of which I have, apparently, 11k!). I'm not a photographer. I just take a bajillion pictures because my pocket computer surveillance device makes it soooo easy. We have a Synology NAS and, using their native app, Synology Moments, I've been able to (a) automagically backup all the 11k loved one pics offloaded from my phone and (b) do the facial recognition thing to sort them into Specific Loved Ones. The latter is not as good as Google's, I'm feeling, but it's good enough. And privacy + good enough > no_privacy + slightly better.
In fact, a note to current/future Synology users: I followed a tutorial which advised me to use Google Takeout to manually export all my Google Photos data into 60+ (!) 2GB .zip files which I then started laboriously unzipping and moving to the NAS manually. Why. WHYY. The Synology Moments Android app just automagically backed all those 11k pics up. So... do that instead.