Is a NAS Need Today?

Paul’s backup series of articles have been great and always great information to glean from them. No matter how long you’ve been backup up your personal files.

In his recent article Digital Decluttering: Some Photo Progress, and a Shift to Documents (Premium) he mentioned his NAS, and others in the comment section talked about their NAS setups. And it got me thinking should I be using a NAS too?

So I searched this topic on YouTube to find some cursory explanations and tutorials. And of course, most of my results are about YouTubers needing to back up all their video and audio production…well that’s not my use case. I’m a normie-tech Dad nerd lol.

My current backup size is about 520GB to iCloud (2TB plan) and my OneDrive (Office365 Family 1TB). My wife and kids have their iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks backed up to iCloud and that’s almost 200GB in total. I do have a 1TB WesternDigital external HD I used to use with macOS Time Machine. So my backup solution is all in the cloud. But more than one place for redundancy.

My backup consists of mostly photos and videos, then personal and family files (financial, medical, school, home, etc. the usual). I’ve some work files of small size and misc things like software; MacFamilyTree, OPMLs for my podcast app PocketCasts and what I have in Reeder 5, HTML of my browser bookmarks, etc. Just odds and ends all us geeks have after being online for a while.

I also have zero desire to incorporate any kind of server maintenance into my IT Dad role lol. I don’t have the desire to rip physical media like movies and music to an HD and stream them to my devices. I use Spotify or YouTube for that. I was bit by the minimalism bug a long time about listening to The Minimalist podcast and gave away all my physical media. I ripped a few but it’s not a lot and they’re in my misc backup section. I am buying Blu-Rays of my favorite 80’s movies but that won’t be so large that it’ll take up a lot of space. This is just an effort to have my favorites available to watch whenever without having to sign up for whatever streaming services have the rights for temporarily.

But with all that said I wonder if a NAS setup would offer some better backup solutions versus my normie-tech backup solution. I had friends that still have their NAS setups they started years back before cloud backup was a common thing. I’m just curious what the community’s experience is with their NAS and their usage. Thanks in advance! Hope everyone is having a good start to their week!

@laurent-giret The Grammarly extension is now working on Safari. I used it on this post, many thanks!