One more thing to think about with cloud storage is what if they deem your content doesn’t fit within their guidelines all of a sudden you lose access to not just photos, but absolutely everything. There have been some horror stories about families that have lost all their content because a cloud service deemed it inappropriate.
or that case when parents uploaded photo of their kids skin problem to Gdrive and send to doctor got flaged as CP and they got into a lot of legal trouble
I totally agree and I love the barely contained passion. Only thing I would add is that one really big advantage of cloud is that if your house catches fire, gets robbed or gets nuked in a freak accidental missile launch all your data are belong to the ether. If its in the cloud and that datacenter goes away they will have a backup somewhere. Personally I have a tiered approach, lots and lots of live data in my garage (not attached to my house), there is a backup and a "coldstore" there as well, inside my house I have a secondary backup of the live data, and in the cloud I have all my really important stuff (documents, photos, etc). The stuff in the cloud is encrypted BEFORE it is sent to the cloud with encryption keys that only I have. Is all that a pain to manage? - Yes, is it normal? No, Am I an IT pro with access to very expensive pro tools to automate all that for me? Yes.
Thanks for this. I have a home severer with about 90TB of storage and completely forgot I have 2 cloud sefvices I'm paying for every month. Cost a fortune for no reason. Casncelled both after watching your video and had a check. More money in the bank for me 🙂
I would honestly either reactivate ONE of the services and put your CRITICAL data out on the cloud. Even the $5/month by Google for 100gig is better than nothing. If you lost your NAS because of mother natures wrath, what would you do? Cloud isn't "BAD", but it should not be your PRIMARY backup as said in the video.
I'm surprised more attention isn't given to use of a personal VPN that is based in your router/firewall rather than in the NAS itself. There's no need to expose the NAS and its OS directly to the Internet; let your router do the job, using a well-documented protocol and software, and let your NAS do the job it does best. Two layers of authentication with the option of different user IDs, certificates (at both ends), passwords, encryption keys, and so on...
Completely agree Tony this is the only way I externally connect to my NAS at home. I think most people don't know or have the experience to set up a VPN so they go with the "EASY way out" Anyway very good point indeed.
What you're saying make total sense, great rant. I have some basic external drives for bulky files and videos, some small cloud storage for copies of extra important data and archives, precious photos and videos and files i need from multiple devices or need to share. Will look into a Nas when I have bigger needs and the prices come down, or if theres a batch of cheap second hand ones that are on discount.
Have you tried hash a file then uploading to the cloud storage then downloading it and compare the hash key? The other advantage of a nas is that you can have a Power Schedule setup so it's not running 24/7 unlike the cloud.
Thank you for your video. It really helps for non tech users like myself. I am deciding between iCloud and a NAS. Concerning the cost, however, when will I have to replace the NAS itself (5 years, 10 years)? When should I replace the drives (5 years, 10 years)? When I add these to the mix, is the NAS still cheaper?
One thing you must mention is NAS replacement. I had a mirrored pair of disks in a QNAP. A couple of years outside of warranty, the controller corrupted both drives in one go. Yes, you might say it is rare, but for me I lost a few years of very memorable family holiday photos and videos. I was gutted. I sent the drives to be forensically recovered, but could not afford to £2500 they wanted. Still have the drives. My recommendation, don't go cheap if the data means a lot to you!!
Lossless compression doesn't alter your data at all(can be infinitely compressed and decompressed and should be identical each time), some cloud image/video storage usually use lossy compression thats why files you mentioned could've changed.
I think for home usage your are 100% correct. For companies I think you are missing many important considerations, above all the need to have on staff someone that can manage a NAS, while buying a service has a much lower barrier. In that sense if cost includes labor, then it is not cheaper than cloud services.
I think the aim of this video was for the home user. I don't recall hearing anything about business activities. But, assuming I did miss that info, if you're a business you're already paying for IT in some way, be it someone hired, or, a contractor. You do pay minute by minute for whatever activity they have to do since one person can only do one thing at a time. But managing a NAS isn't at all that difficult once it's setup and monitored. Not to mention, the volume of data involved is so much greater that you DO need special talent to handle the security, monitoring and ensuring data redundancy for both internal and external. I lost my NAS, and only I am affected.. as is my wallet. A business though? They'd WANT to put money into making sure their data is safe and secure, otherwise, they may be closing doors.
The idea that using cloud services means you don't need to have IT pros on staff, or on contract, is false. To properly secure any cloud service you need to know what you're doing. Sure you can just sign up, take all the default settings, and load up all your data. But you will never pass any security compliance, and when you loose everything to a ransomware attack or other breach, you'll wish you'd just hired a decent IT pro to help.
@@kf4hqf2 sure but the numbers are completely different. I managed a team of 50 engineers for many years and we could run close to 500 environments on AWS with 3 devOps engineers. I can guarantee you that we would never ever ever ever in 100000 years manage the same with 3 people using our own infrastructure. Sure we spent a lot on AWS but I could hire just 2-3 people more with that amount and I would then have to also pay electricity, hardware, space. That’s a large scale use case. Other businesses I worked with are law firms and SMBs which have 5-10 employees, no IT in staff and outsource everything. There without cloud services they would spend waaaay more.
@@Mr76Pontiac exactly right, your argument is the reason why for businesses cloud services are far cheaper and superior. If you are an SMB with 10 people on staff you can’t afford 2-3 IT admins which manage infrastructure, build it, monitor the disks, replace the older components, keep the services up to date, harden the security, etc. What you can afford is a 0.5 FTE that helps you with IT stuff that sets up for you a secure cloud service and does a small amount of admin. Sure you are going to pay some more per TB to whatever vendor you pick, but you will be getting that cloud vendor to take care of infrastructure, updates and most of the security aspects for you.
I'm already a convert but this video really needs a Part 2. Once you are able to connect to your NAS remotely, how exactly do you access your files ? FTP / SFTP or ??? I recently experimented with SyncThing ( it's free ) and it's brilliant. You can be more selective about which folders to sync than with OneDrive and it's extremely fast. It does take some getting used to though. I have it running on my Synology NAS and my Windows desktop and laptop.
The moment you open up your NAS to the internet, either through a VPN/Proxy service, or just open the ports, you're looking at potential data breaches. That said, VPN/Proxy services exist, sometimes for free, where you can install an agent on your machines and you can have your two machines talk back and forth. For my NAS replacement that's got to happen in 2024, I'll be looking at a proxy service so I can link up a couple of machines so one says here, the other goes off site to my brothers place. The remote is going to only have 2 or 4 TB instead of the 8TB of data I have, but, its remote, secure, and if it dies, it's a short drive to replace the drive. (I just repopulate the data with a new drive at home)
Wow, that opening rant about file deletion became relevant recently, with Google Drive users reporting vanished files and folders and files on Dropbox that had been deleted suddenly reappearing.
I think there is only one real downside of buying a NAS instead of hosting your data: the chance of a catastrophic failure with a NAS is (slightly) higher compared to hosting your data in the cloud. You need at least one backup NAS to protect your data better, which is not included in the price example your gave in the video.
Thank you for the great video and I agree. I mostly use the data myself, but how would you go about sharing files with the outside world the one or two times per month you do need to? (i'd want to keep it behind the firewall most of the time)
OK ... if you use the NAS as the primary local file server with 1 or 2 drive parity redundancy, and you have a secondary local save device as 1st backup, and an off site moms closet type 2nd backup that you update once every 3 months or whatever ... the cloud is still a lovely place for a 3rd backup for mission critical files only once a week. Idea being; There is no 'better' but it IS 'smart' to use both local NAS and cloud use intelligently.
Just pledged to buy my first NAS the Zimacube Pro but won't get it until March 2024 if it all goes ahead😬 any tips on what else I can use a NAS for bar my 15TB media collection?
all about is speed, i tried syno drive and share to my clients the speed the see the photos in syno drive mobile app is just not fast as google drive, maybe i set the client to log in by quick connect, but i dont really know how how speed different between quick connect and ddns
And what will happen with the NAS if you have a disaster at home like a fire or flood ?. Or a burglary ? The data in the Cloud is stored in very secure Data Centers and in several different locations.
That's why you have a 2nd Nas as a backup, or a local usb backup that is portable, or even add a basic cloud target...there's plenty of options. Heck, even an ioSAFE disaster proof NAS. Putting data in the cloud solely because then it cannot be deleted/obliterated is not a good who a good enough reason to store it there, when the options to reduce that danger on a NAS/private server are easy to provision for. Even at the price...at least you own/hold your data
@@nascompares Thank for your answer. Is a Synology NAS capable of automatically backing up data to a USB drive that I could take with me when I go on a trip?
Maybe i am lucky but I pay for 1g/1g internet and I do get it when I do speedtests I usually get about 1100/950. Now i do have a 10g internal backbone so that probably helps.
I won't go remote storage for security reasons, always inflating prices with receiving less for whats being inflated (Notice Netflix prices anyone? And that's not even OUR storage!), and just the whole idea of what happens when the service shuts down. Then what? Starting all over again pushing data to a new site.
I Must understand ⚠ > What will my experience be like if I wanna have a Cloud backup of my Laptop while I travel Europe and my NAS is located in a country in the middle east? Say, 2-3 hour time zone difference of a distance. Will everything be a slow experience because of the distance? Even if both ends will have a decent internet connection? I understood Cloud services like Google Drive/Dropbox - have servers all over the world- so I will have a fast connection to upload/download files to and from it. But, I didn't see one video of a NAS user talking about traveling and backing up files from abroad. Help..............?!
You know you are making the age old argument... Own or rent.... Independence or dependence.... Complete control or very limited control. The one thing I noticed you didn't cover. Possession is 9/10ths of the law. If your data is not on hardware YOU OWN..... you do not own that data. If you put data on a free data storage you give up your rights to copyright. AND even you do... if you have something they want.... they will just take it. (see you in court and they have better lawyers)
$120 a year for 2TB? Pass. 👎 My DIY NAS has a total of 12TB storage capacity (4TB pair mirrored & 8TB pair mirrored), with a little over 4TB used. About 2.3TB of that in TV shows and movies. I'm still ripping my DVD collection to put all my movies on the NAS. I can't imagine what that would cost me in cloud storage per year.
@@jackipiegg I love that you're fixating on the 2 bay for RAID, but missing the key point that any and every data professional will tell you - RAID is not a backup, It is a failover mitigation process.
One thing to consider. A lot of corporate firewalls will not let a private server through. I have one major client where even Dropbox's an issue. Fortunately some personnel have Dropbox privileges, but there is no way they could access a private server like a QNAP or Synology.
One more thing to think about with cloud storage is what if they deem your content doesn’t fit within their guidelines all of a sudden you lose access to not just photos, but absolutely everything. There have been some horror stories about families that have lost all their content because a cloud service deemed it inappropriate.
or that case when parents uploaded photo of their kids skin problem to Gdrive and send to doctor got flaged as CP and they got into a lot of legal trouble
I totally agree and I love the barely contained passion. Only thing I would add is that one really big advantage of cloud is that if your house catches fire, gets robbed or gets nuked in a freak accidental missile launch all your data are belong to the ether. If its in the cloud and that datacenter goes away they will have a backup somewhere. Personally I have a tiered approach, lots and lots of live data in my garage (not attached to my house), there is a backup and a "coldstore" there as well, inside my house I have a secondary backup of the live data, and in the cloud I have all my really important stuff (documents, photos, etc). The stuff in the cloud is encrypted BEFORE it is sent to the cloud with encryption keys that only I have. Is all that a pain to manage? - Yes, is it normal? No, Am I an IT pro with access to very expensive pro tools to automate all that for me? Yes.
offsite backup?
Thanks for this. I have a home severer with about 90TB of storage and completely forgot I have 2 cloud sefvices I'm paying for every month. Cost a fortune for no reason. Casncelled both after watching your video and had a check. More money in the bank for me 🙂
I would honestly either reactivate ONE of the services and put your CRITICAL data out on the cloud. Even the $5/month by Google for 100gig is better than nothing. If you lost your NAS because of mother natures wrath, what would you do?
Cloud isn't "BAD", but it should not be your PRIMARY backup as said in the video.
I'm surprised more attention isn't given to use of a personal VPN that is based in your router/firewall rather than in the NAS itself. There's no need to expose the NAS and its OS directly to the Internet; let your router do the job, using a well-documented protocol and software, and let your NAS do the job it does best. Two layers of authentication with the option of different user IDs, certificates (at both ends), passwords, encryption keys, and so on...
Completely agree Tony this is the only way I externally connect to my NAS at home. I think most people don't know or have the experience to set up a VPN so they go with the "EASY way out" Anyway very good point indeed.
Yes exactly right
What you're saying make total sense, great rant. I have some basic external drives for bulky files and videos, some small cloud storage for copies of extra important data and archives, precious photos and videos and files i need from multiple devices or need to share. Will look into a Nas when I have bigger needs and the prices come down, or if theres a batch of cheap second hand ones that are on discount.
Totally agree about speed there is no comparison at all for the money. Unless you have access to some serious money for a 10 GB line.
such a great channel ! learning so much from you thanks
Excellent info as always.
Have you tried hash a file then uploading to the cloud storage then downloading it and compare the hash key?
The other advantage of a nas is that you can have a Power Schedule setup so it's not running 24/7 unlike the cloud.
Thank you for your video. It really helps for non tech users like myself. I am deciding between iCloud and a NAS. Concerning the cost, however, when will I have to replace the NAS itself (5 years, 10 years)? When should I replace the drives (5 years, 10 years)? When I add these to the mix, is the NAS still cheaper?
One thing you must mention is NAS replacement. I had a mirrored pair of disks in a QNAP. A couple of years outside of warranty, the controller corrupted both drives in one go. Yes, you might say it is rare, but for me I lost a few years of very memorable family holiday photos and videos. I was gutted. I sent the drives to be forensically recovered, but could not afford to £2500 they wanted. Still have the drives. My recommendation, don't go cheap if the data means a lot to you!!
Hopefully you and your family can get that money together or find a better quote.
Lossless compression doesn't alter your data at all(can be infinitely compressed and decompressed and should be identical each time), some cloud image/video storage usually use lossy compression thats why files you mentioned could've changed.
I think for home usage your are 100% correct. For companies I think you are missing many important considerations, above all the need to have on staff someone that can manage a NAS, while buying a service has a much lower barrier. In that sense if cost includes labor, then it is not cheaper than cloud services.
I think the aim of this video was for the home user. I don't recall hearing anything about business activities.
But, assuming I did miss that info, if you're a business you're already paying for IT in some way, be it someone hired, or, a contractor. You do pay minute by minute for whatever activity they have to do since one person can only do one thing at a time. But managing a NAS isn't at all that difficult once it's setup and monitored. Not to mention, the volume of data involved is so much greater that you DO need special talent to handle the security, monitoring and ensuring data redundancy for both internal and external. I lost my NAS, and only I am affected.. as is my wallet. A business though? They'd WANT to put money into making sure their data is safe and secure, otherwise, they may be closing doors.
The idea that using cloud services means you don't need to have IT pros on staff, or on contract, is false. To properly secure any cloud service you need to know what you're doing. Sure you can just sign up, take all the default settings, and load up all your data. But you will never pass any security compliance, and when you loose everything to a ransomware attack or other breach, you'll wish you'd just hired a decent IT pro to help.
@@kf4hqf2 sure but the numbers are completely different. I managed a team of 50 engineers for many years and we could run close to 500 environments on AWS with 3 devOps engineers. I can guarantee you that we would never ever ever ever in 100000 years manage the same with 3 people using our own infrastructure. Sure we spent a lot on AWS but I could hire just 2-3 people more with that amount and I would then have to also pay electricity, hardware, space.
That’s a large scale use case. Other businesses I worked with are law firms and SMBs which have 5-10 employees, no IT in staff and outsource everything. There without cloud services they would spend waaaay more.
@@Mr76Pontiac exactly right, your argument is the reason why for businesses cloud services are far cheaper and superior. If you are an SMB with 10 people on staff you can’t afford 2-3 IT admins which manage infrastructure, build it, monitor the disks, replace the older components, keep the services up to date, harden the security, etc. What you can afford is a 0.5 FTE that helps you with IT stuff that sets up for you a secure cloud service and does a small amount of admin. Sure you are going to pay some more per TB to whatever vendor you pick, but you will be getting that cloud vendor to take care of infrastructure, updates and most of the security aspects for you.
Cloud doesn’t need gazillions of youtube videos explaining it, it just works.
I'm already a convert but this video really needs a Part 2. Once you are able to connect to your NAS remotely, how exactly do you access your files ? FTP / SFTP or ??? I recently experimented with SyncThing ( it's free ) and it's brilliant. You can be more selective about which folders to sync than with OneDrive and it's extremely fast. It does take some getting used to though. I have it running on my Synology NAS and my Windows desktop and laptop.
The moment you open up your NAS to the internet, either through a VPN/Proxy service, or just open the ports, you're looking at potential data breaches.
That said, VPN/Proxy services exist, sometimes for free, where you can install an agent on your machines and you can have your two machines talk back and forth.
For my NAS replacement that's got to happen in 2024, I'll be looking at a proxy service so I can link up a couple of machines so one says here, the other goes off site to my brothers place. The remote is going to only have 2 or 4 TB instead of the 8TB of data I have, but, its remote, secure, and if it dies, it's a short drive to replace the drive. (I just repopulate the data with a new drive at home)
Wow, that opening rant about file deletion became relevant recently, with Google Drive users reporting vanished files and folders and files on Dropbox that had been deleted suddenly reappearing.
I think there is only one real downside of buying a NAS instead of hosting your data: the chance of a catastrophic failure with a NAS is (slightly) higher compared to hosting your data in the cloud. You need at least one backup NAS to protect your data better, which is not included in the price example your gave in the video.
Thank you for the great video and I agree. I mostly use the data myself, but how would you go about sharing files with the outside world the one or two times per month you do need to? (i'd want to keep it behind the firewall most of the time)
OK ... if you use the NAS as the primary local file server with 1 or 2 drive parity redundancy, and you have a secondary local save device as 1st backup, and an off site moms closet type 2nd backup that you update once every 3 months or whatever ... the cloud is still a lovely place for a 3rd backup for mission critical files only once a week. Idea being; There is no 'better' but it IS 'smart' to use both local NAS and cloud use intelligently.
Recently purchased a DS223 and a cheap 1Tb SSD and ditched Dropbox for Synology Drive.
I store encrypted data in the cloud for offsite backup.
Just pledged to buy my first NAS the Zimacube Pro but won't get it until March 2024 if it all goes ahead😬 any tips on what else I can use a NAS for bar my 15TB media collection?
10:02 Cloud providers be like: "all you had to do was to follow the damn train" xD
Mate, I'm still having Vietnam-like flashbacks of that mission....
The good thing is there's very few reason to to have both.
I would like to see adobe build an app for synology and qnap so there is a way to auto sort and setup projects and view and share them and sync them.
I remember there is limit on Google drive for about 750 GB upload per day per account
all about is speed, i tried syno drive and share to my clients the speed the see the photos in syno drive mobile app is just not fast as google drive, maybe i set the client to log in by quick connect, but i dont really know how how speed different between quick connect and ddns
Nice!
And what will happen with the NAS if you have a disaster at home like a fire or flood ?. Or a burglary ?
The data in the Cloud is stored in very secure Data Centers and in several different locations.
That's why you have a 2nd Nas as a backup, or a local usb backup that is portable, or even add a basic cloud target...there's plenty of options. Heck, even an ioSAFE disaster proof NAS. Putting data in the cloud solely because then it cannot be deleted/obliterated is not a good who a good enough reason to store it there, when the options to reduce that danger on a NAS/private server are easy to provision for. Even at the price...at least you own/hold your data
@@nascompares Thank for your answer.
Is a Synology NAS capable of automatically backing up data to a USB drive that I could take with me when I go on a trip?
Maybe i am lucky but I pay for 1g/1g internet and I do get it when I do speedtests I usually get about 1100/950. Now i do have a 10g internal backbone so that probably helps.
I won't go remote storage for security reasons, always inflating prices with receiving less for whats being inflated (Notice Netflix prices anyone? And that's not even OUR storage!), and just the whole idea of what happens when the service shuts down. Then what? Starting all over again pushing data to a new site.
I have an absolute distrust of the cloud with respect to data security.
I Must understand ⚠ > What will my experience be like if I wanna have a Cloud backup of my Laptop while I travel Europe and my NAS is located in a country in the middle east? Say, 2-3 hour time zone difference of a distance. Will everything be a slow experience because of the distance? Even if both ends will have a decent internet connection?
I understood Cloud services like Google Drive/Dropbox - have servers all over the world- so I will have a fast connection to upload/download files to and from it.
But, I didn't see one video of a NAS user talking about traveling and backing up files from abroad.
Help..............?!
Exactly! I live in two cities in different countries 6000km apart - Cloud just works!
@@VietnamSteve So, No NAS for you, huh?
Cloud just costs like a NAS system per every 1 year. It's insane.
You know you are making the age old argument... Own or rent.... Independence or dependence.... Complete control or very limited control.
The one thing I noticed you didn't cover. Possession is 9/10ths of the law. If your data is not on hardware YOU OWN..... you do not own that data.
If you put data on a free data storage you give up your rights to copyright. AND even you do... if you have something they want.... they will just take it.
(see you in court and they have better lawyers)
$120 a year for 2TB? Pass. 👎
My DIY NAS has a total of 12TB storage capacity (4TB pair mirrored & 8TB pair mirrored), with a little over 4TB used. About 2.3TB of that in TV shows and movies. I'm still ripping my DVD collection to put all my movies on the NAS. I can't imagine what that would cost me in cloud storage per year.
What DVD ripping program do you use?
NAS is going to be cheaper than cloud if you consider for long run
Bro rly hates the clouds 😂💀
15:01
This argument is bad. You don't have backup if you use 1 bay nas anyway.
1 bays are still a backup of data that's stored on another device - Exactly like cloud mirrors like one drive
@@bengrogan9710
did you even watch the video. his argument was "why pay for cloud when you can buy a 1 bay nas". What a joke.
@@jackipiegg I love that you're fixating on the 2 bay for RAID, but missing the key point that any and every data professional will tell you - RAID is not a backup, It is a failover mitigation process.
@@bengrogan9710
Exactly! This youtuber doesn't talk about backup and says 1 bay nas is better than cloud. facepalm
@jackipiegg You are being an idiot now.
You have the data on your primary computer, it is mirrored to a NAS - this is a backup of the data
Always going to be better than cloud ? Theres no proper replacement for google photos. nas is an alternative but better is questionable.
One thing to consider. A lot of corporate firewalls will not let a private server through. I have one major client where even Dropbox's an issue. Fortunately some personnel have Dropbox privileges, but there is no way they could access a private server like a QNAP or Synology.