Recently it was decided that the time had come to upgrade our storage setup here at home. We’ve been relying on some external hard drives for backup that were getting pretty long in the tooth, and needed to either get new ones or figure out another option.
I’ve also given up on streaming music services. I used grooveshark back in the day, and like it – but then it went under. Tried Spotify and Google Music – and they’re ok, but didn’t have a lot of my old music I like.
I came up in the Napster days and have a decent sized MP3 collection, still sitting around on the old drives in my old desktop machine. Putting those on the laptop wasn’t a great option, too many files! Not to mention my completely legal copies of movies and TV shows built up over the years.
So, after a lot of research and debate, I picked up a Synology 2 NAS from Amazon, with a couple 4TB drives, and a USB-C drive enclosure. I needed some way to get stuff of all those old hard drives sitting around the house!
We’ve had this thing for almost two months now and it’s working like a champ. I’ve condensed most of my old files onto it, and it’s serving as the backup location for two laptops. Backing up over wifi means the laptops actually get backed up as often as they should! It also works well as a Plex server.
I’ve been careful to not turn on the “cloud” functionality on it – I’m perfectly happy if no one (including me) can get at the files on the NAS from outside the home network!
Now I’m starting to see the limits of our ISP-provided Wifi router as the network gets more and more use… might be time for more research… or even go old school and run some ethernet!