Online Accounts 2025: An American NAS in Mexico ⭐

We flew to Mexico City this past Friday and aside from a trip this coming week to Hawaii for Qualcomm’s annual Snapdragon Summit, we’ll be here for almost exactly two months, with our flight back to Pennsylvania booked for the week before Thanksgiving. Every trip to and from Mexico is its own story, as we bring things back and forth each time. But the flight here was particularly noteworthy because I brought one of the two NASes I bought this year with me.
? Two NASes
It’s been quite the year. When Google took away our access to the Thurrott.com YouTube channel in January, I recalibrated my approach to online accounts and started this series of articles with the idea of reducing my reliance on Big Tech and the epidemic of enshittification that these companies punish us with.

There’s a lot that goes into that, and the work is ongoing. But one of my big pushes was to finally get a new NAS, something I’ve been meaning to do for years. But this time is different: There are two NASes, not one. One will be kept here in Mexico City and the other will stay in Pennsylvania. And instead of augmenting what I do through Big Tech cloud services, these NASes are now at the center of my workflow, with Big Tech reduced to what is essentially a backup role.

I got the first NAS, a two-disk Synology DiskStation DS224+, this past May and the Synology Drive and remote access experiences were so seamless and without drama that it quickly moved past the experiment stage. I got the second NAS, a four–disk/two-SSD Synology DiskStation DS423+, in August, though I’m currently using it in a two-disk configuration and syncing all my data between both units.

And that’s where we left things.
? Sometimes you just need a little time
Since August, I’ve just kept using both NASes to make sure all was well. And it has been: The data syncs seamlessly between both of them, giving me the redundancy that I want. And now that I’ve brought one of the NASes to Mexico, I have geographical redundancy as well. If there’s a natural disaster, a theft, a hardware failure, or whatever other issue with one NAS, the one should just keep soldering forward without any interruptions or data loss.

With the trip approaching, I had a couple of final tasks to complete.

My archives are already backed up in multiple places, including cloud services like OneDrive and Google Drive, but I wanted to make sure my current working set, which is essentially the contents of three folders in Docs\Current\Work (Code, Book, and To-do) was backed up just in case I got here and nothing worked. So I backed that up to OneDrive the day before we flew.

I also had to shut down the smaller of the new two NASes, the DiskStation DS224+, and move the bigger NAS, the DiskStation DS423+, into the shelving system where it belongs, next to the old NAS (which is shut off) and our Internet router.

Both of those changes went fine, and then it was time to go.
✈️ Flying with a NAS
I like to travel...