Online Accounts 2025: Little Tech Remote Access (Premium)

The arrival of reliable and reasonably inexpensive cloud storage services like OneDrive and Google Drive made the complexity and cost of server-based systems like Windows Home Server and Windows Server Essentials passé. And as they evolved to include what we now called On Demand capabilities in which one can selectively sync folders or individual files between a PC or other device and the cloud for offline use, that gap widened even further. But NAS devices still play an important role. They're simpler and less expensive than those old server systems, not to mention smaller. And in this age of enshittification and the understandable backlash against Big Tech, they can play a crucial role for those who want to minimize their exposure to these enormous corporations or control their own data.

Different people have different priorities. But those priorities can change, too.

When I started Thurrott.com in 2015, those server-based solutions were on the way out thanks to NAS devices and the rise of the cloud, first with enterprises and then with consumers too. This shift led to conversations about hybrid cloud--a mix of on-prem and truly cloud-based infrastructure--and private cloud, a rebranding of self-hosted, self-maintained on-prem infrastructure. Predictably, NAS vendors like Western Digital (WD) began marketing their products--business or consumer--as private cloud solutions to keep up with the times. Today, this is largely still the case: Terms like cloud, hybrid cloud, and private cloud are still commonly used and well understood.

But the way I use storage, and my relationship with data backup and sync, has shifted over the intervening decade. In 2015, I wrote about my backup strategies of the day, bought a WD My Cloud EX2 NAS, and then proceeded to use it mostly as a data backup, since I started shifting my daily workflows to OneDrive. It included remote access and media sharing functionality, of course, but the former disappeared when the device went out of support in 2021. And by that point, the NAS had become slow and unreliable. This should have triggered an upgrade, a new device. But because OneDrive and other cloud services had advanced so much by then, I could put it off. I had shifted from a backup-focused storage strategy to a hybrid strategy that I now think of as sync and archive, with that archived data replicated to multiple cloud storage services (and to the old NAS, still) for replication/redundancy purposes.

My system, such as it is, always had one obvious Achilles Heel, even when it was working well: I could never stop paying for it. I get 1 TB of OneDrive storage as part of a Microsoft 365 Family subscription that now costs $130 per year. To be fair, that's per user, and that subscription provides for 6 users, so it's technically 6 TB of storage, which is one of a few things that puts Microsoft 365 into the "no-brainer" category, in my opinion. But my wife, kids, and father-in-law all use this subscription, so...