Why I moved from Google Drive & Photos to a self-hosted backup solution

Something I learnt about myself at an early is that I love gadgets and getting to experience the latest gadgets and technology gives me a thrill, so I am always on the lookout for a new gadget/tech to experience, try to capture my experience on a tech which was on my list for a long time.

It was the end of 2020 when I was at the end of concluding the notion experiment, my google drive space was close to breaching its free quota, and I had to start paying a subscription fee to continue using the service now. Not just that, my near and dear college hard disk went kaput a few months back as well, I did everything to try and recover the data, ran through the web to find try recovery tools, begged friendly programmer buddies to find a solution, went to official and shady repair shops to see if I could somehow recover the data, but nothing worked. This hard disk had all my GoPro footage from years of bike rides, photos from my riders and the programs I had written back in college, losing all of this hurt the most and this wasn't my only instance, Like Sheldon Copper's secret storage compartment I have hordes data from the days of floppy disks and I have lost data multiple times when the storage devices gave up or got corrupted because of not being used for long durations. Hence the need to find some long-term solutions to both problems. I had three major options here

• Get a subscription to Google Drive, iCloud, OneDrive or AWS
• Buy an off-the-shelf NAS
• Build a DIY NAS solution using open-source solutions like FreeNAS

Easiest and the cheapest option here was to get a google drive or icloud subscription but having experienced how easy it is to lose access to this data if something happened to your account access, the cloud data services weren’t a bet for my long-time solution for data retention.

The second option was to build a DIY NAS, if you already have a spare/old computer this is a good option, so I started researching different ways in which one can build and host a NAS at home. While the concept was never alien to me and I had managed to set up a rudimentary NAS using an SSD and my router back when I was in college itself. The main issue here was that I stopped using a desktop and hadn't bought a new PC in the last 10 years so no spare old PC to resurrect, the only option was to find out if I could repurpose my old college laptop as my NAS. After a couple of weeks of reading articles, discussion groups comments and watching a ton of YouTube videos, it was clear that my old laptop was probably the worst choice to set up a DIY NAS on.

By this point, my mind was made up to try and find out a way to set up my own NAS so the search went to look for either buying a new computer and setting up my own NAS or buying an off-the-shelf NAS. After a couple of days of research, I realized that buying a new computer to build a NAS at that point wasn't practical, we were in the peak of silicon shortage at this point so all the PC component prices had gone through the roof also the software setup to run my own NAS was the Achilles heel, even though I had a rudimentary understanding of the system functioned it requires a fair deep understanding of TCP-IP layer. The amount of time it would take to learn and keep myself updated for the duration I ran this system was impractical, while something like Free-NAS still made the work of setting up easier it still came with a warning of “You should know what you are doing”, which was clearly beyond my basic understanding of network protocols.

So came the final realization, I had to buy a prebuilt NAS, thankfully while I researched about self-hosted NAS I found out that there are only two trusted players in this space available in India, Asustor’s Lockerstor series and Synology’s DiskStation (DSM) series. The best part of a prebuilt was the ease of setup compared to a self-hosted solution like FreeNAS. I already had seen Synology diskstation a few years back thanks to them sponsoring popular YouTubers in the tech space, so I naturally gravitated towards Synology besides the fact that Asustor OS wasn't very user-friendly then (I think they have upgraded their OS to be comparable to DSM now).

Prebuilt and Synology being decided, now it was time to choose which version of DSM to buy. DSMs systems start from 2-bay Realtek to 8-bay models with intel celeron chips for home use at that point, I think now they even offer a 1-bay model and all the systems come with a Realtek processor. This was probably the hardest decision to take, mulled over it for months, and I finally gave up and went for a 4-bay DSM, in hindsight this was a mistake, I should have bought a 2-bay first and then upgraded a few years later to a 4 bay system to fully use the capabilities of what a 4 bay brings.

A month down the line, I had the system at home along with hard disks and everything else that I needed to run the system. Here started the journey to painfully move photos, videos and documents collected over 15 years started, which took me a whole week's worth of effort. Once the files got moved, then it was time to discover and play around with DSM 7. It has been close to 8 to 9 months of running with Synology’s Photo, Drive, Video station, surveillance station and Office applications, and I am impressed, such a solid system, with regular updates and improvements, I haven't yet gotten around to using Docker, Plex and a bunch of other third-party apps so a lot more to do with the system. One big feature I am still waiting to test is the automation to back up all docs securely to a friend’s DSM, given the upfront cost it takes to set up such a system I doubt if anyone I know is going to buy this in India. I think I might have to buy a single-bay NAS and put it in a friend's place at some point in the future to have my data safely and securely backed in at least 2 locations to get to the data protection trinity.

I haven’t talked too much about how I have the system running or about the different applications Synology offers here but if you are interested then hit me up, keen to find fellow Geeks.