Funny you should mention this. I once worked at a startup that stored lots of remote sensing data. Their strategy was to put it on a Synology. When the Synology filled up, they bought another, and so forth. Only some of the Synologys were online at any particular time, and there was no indexing to find which Synology held what data.

Plus, there were no backups so if one Synology were to blow up, all the data on it was lost.

Since they were a small startup it made some sense to start this way, but they had no plans on what to do about it as they got bigger.