You NEED A NAS! Easy, private home cloud, or Google / Office 365 replacement!

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#privacy #nas #homeserver

00:00 Intro 00:44 What is a NAS? 02:35 How do you set it up? 04:29 File storage, accessible anywhere 06:13 Backup everything securely 07:04 Photos management, with auto sync 08:04 Movies, TV Shows & Music server 09:17 Productivity: Google or Office 365 replacement 10:23 And a lot of other 11:11 Price: more affordable than you think 12:29 Sponsor: Get a PC that runs Linux perfectly 13:17 Support the channel

NAS stands for Network Attached Storage, but basically what it is is a computer in a small enclosure whose space is mainly taken by plenty of hard drives. Think of it as a home server without the hassle of setting it up yourself.

Here, I'll use a Synology NAS, because they were kind enough to provide me with their DS1522+ NAS and a bunch of drives in order to make this video. Synology is one of the biggest NAS manufacturers, and they run their own NAS operating system called Diskstation manager. It uses Linux, but the OS that runs on top of it isn't open source.

Let's see how you actually setup one of these things. First, you need to slot your drives in, then you plug your NAS, and then you connect it to your router or internet provider box, and you boot it up.

And basically, once that's done, if all you need is file storage, then you got it. Here, on my Fedora laptop, I can just open the file manager, and I'll automatically see my NAS available.

I also have access to the OS interface, that basically is a grid of icons, straight from my webbrowser on my local network.

I can quickly enable my NAS to be accessible from outside my local network. Here, in the OS, I'll just go to "external access", and create a domain name in a few clicks. I'll also install the webdav server package, which will let me access the storage on my NAS from anywhere on any network.

A good backup strategy is to have a local copy of your files on your computer, then a backup of that at home, and another backup of that outside of your home. Backup solutions are a dime a dozen, and you can just automate that with Synology Drive, or any other backup app for any other NAS.

You also have stuff like Active backup for business, which lets you, well, backup another NAS, multiple PCs, servers and even virtual machines to your NAS.

For photo Storage, there's a neat little app called Synology Photos. I can install it in one click, and then access it from the operating system directly. And there we go, I have an online photo library, where I can add photos manually and even have face recognition if I want, that's running locally on my NAS.

I can install the Synology Photos app on my phone, and auto upload anything from there, photos and videos.

A NAS can also be used as a media server, to store your movies and TV shows. Here, for example, I can install Plex in one click, from the Package Center. I could also install JellyFin using the Docker app and its docker image.

Plex can also handle music, if you have a local music collection, but if you're more of an itunes person, there's an iTunes server app you can install on Synology's Nas, to be accessible by a large variety of music players, including on Linux.

For productivity, I can install Note Station for notes, or Synology Contacts and Calendars to have my own online solution to store all of that, and they have Synology office which is an office suite, integrated with your file storage, that lets you create and edit text files, spreadsheets, or presentations, straight from your NAS.

On other NAS operating systems, you could also install stuff like Collabora, or OnlyOffice if you prefer.

Of course, we have to talk about the price. If you start adding things up, it makes total sense: you can have a small NAS for around 150 bucks, and a 2TB hard drive for another 50 dollars. That's 200 bucks, which is less than 2 years of monthly Google payments for 2TB.