My parents are looking into getting their own NAS to replace iCloud. I don’t really have much experience with that, and zero experience with apple stuff. They are also not very techy, but at least enthusiastic.
Can sombody recommend easy NAS products where you basically just buy a device, do some basic setup, and then it functions as your at-home cloud? I don’t want to get roped into doing too much admin for them, but they do already have DDNS for some other smart home crap. Bonus if it’s non-US tech.
Personally I run a nextcloud server on a VPS that I could expand, that’s not quite selfhosted, I don’t know if that integrates well with apple though, are they better off if I just onboard them onto that?
Cheers in advance
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I have an old surplus QNAP. I love it. Very capable, easy to setup, easy to use it and forget about it. Mine is set up for RAID5.
Be certain to get a reliable UPS for it. And have a spare drive on hand.
Please consider RAID6 or ensure your data is fully backed up. RAID5 falls flat if a drive fails during resilvering the array.
@RunningInRVA
Please don’t label RAID a backup because it is not. RAID 1, 5 or 6 will give you a robust drive pool that is able to recover from a failed drive.Backups should be done on a different medium and ideally off-site.
Well I wasn’t trying to, exactly. Just trying to convey that RAID5 is not considered reliable and that I was urging the commenter to ensure they have a backup if that’s what they are going to use. Regardless of how you configure your NAS, you can always lose data by mistake.
@RunningInRVA Apologies, I have clearly read your comment wrongly.
It’s not an extra life, it’s another health point. Red mushroom, not green mushroom.
@captain_aggravated It is a little cryptic.
This will be an unpopular suggestion here but why not just go all in on iCloud? It’s reasonably inexpensive for not data-hoarding amounts of data, reasonably secure and E2E encrypted. Given the low cost, zero setup if they’re already Apple people and lack of admin I think it is ideal for them.
I pay for iCloud storage because I want HomeKit Secure Video cloud storage (I also have a local copy on disk).
can you verify that it’s E2E encrypted?
@PotatoesFall Good to hear your parents are aware of the issues with ‘cloud’ services and choose to invest in a NAS. To be honest any off the shelf NAS will do. Important is to determine the storage capacity they will be needing for the next five years and add a good 50% to that number. For instance, you expect they need 2.5 TB then you should get 4 TB netto storage.
Depending on your backup strategy and how robust you want the NAS storage to be you can choose a single bay or a multi bay NAS.
@PotatoesFall A good off-site data backup is definitely something to look into. Where will you place the NAS and where will the backup be stored? Let me know if you need any guidance on this topic.
