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hobowankenobi

macrumors 68020
Aug 27, 2015
2,125
935
on the land line mr. smith.
Lots of options. You could task/retask existing hardware, but I would vote for a Synology NAS as it would be a bit better at all tasks:

SMB file server
automatic file sync for Mac, PC, and mobile
Backup all devices
Superior backup: granular config options, logging, and admin tools
multiple drives in RAID to minimize risk of drive failure
Easy to change/upgrade drives
Low power, designed to be headless
Share web links for remote access

How much data and backup storage do you expect to need?
 
Last edited:

HDFan

Contributor
Jun 30, 2007
7,290
3,341
I would avoid using a NAS (my preference is QNAP) as:

1. It adds another system and OS which has to be setup and maintained. The manufacturers certainly make it as easy as possible to set them up, but they do require setup and maintenance: security updates, virus scanning, firmware upgrades, network setup, etc.

2. You need to punch a hole in your firewall to access it from off-site locations. This requires an additional learning curve beyond the NAS itself to setup your router to allow access to the NAS while protecting your network.

3. Unless you turn on/off the NAS when you leave/return home it would be running constantly. Besides the electric costs, which can be negligible or significant depending on where you live, you have to factor in the costs of hardware replacement. Storage media eventually does need replacement. If you are lucky it won't fail at the 6 year average for hard disks.

There are on-line solutions available such as iCloud and dropbox. Don't know much about Dropbox but have used iCloud for a while. Avoids all of the issues above, and if you are lucky "it just works" as it allow you to access all of the iCloud folders from all of your devices.

I should note that I just turned off iCloud drive on my Mac. Been having some major Finder problems since upgrading to Ventura and found it confusing when to access my "Documents" folder I had to access it in iCloud rather than the usual location on my local disk.
 
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