I love having a NAS that replaces Time Machine, Dropbox, iCloud, Netflix, Spotify, Disney plus, Hulu, runs home automation, has my security system on it, etc etc.

People use so many cloud services and having it all private and self-hosted is absolutely amazing. It’s really not that hard to set up either, and there’s little to maintenance outside replacing a failed drive.

People here likely know how to do all that safely, but lots of less technically inclined people end up with their data encrypted and have to choose between starting over or paying a ransom. I have a QNAP device so I follow their subreddit and there's a steady stream of people who have lost everything to ransomware because their NAS was visible from the internet. I follow the standard advice from that subreddit - keep it behind a firewall with UPnP turned off and no ports forwarded to the NAS and never enable MyQNAPCloud (or whatever it's called).

Seems like more of a QNAP problem than anything

Not only: https://nascompares.com/2022/03/01/terramaster-nas-devices-b...

Yup. QNAP software quality (and hardware) is complete garbage. I’ve off and on tried to incorporate them into my “system” and they always let me down. You’re putting everything at risk using one of their boxes.

I vastly prefer content be cloud based. Ever since Spotify came out, I've never downloaded music illegally again -- it's just so much better and more convenient. Can't imagine going back to what.cd days and having to download and maintain a music collection manually.

Sure, but then Netflix removed stargate on a whim and one of my favorite shows went poof.

That started me down the path to owning all my own media.

It also didn’t help that iCloud Photos is a privacy nightmare.

Mind sharing your setup, I’d love to replicate it. Thanks

8 bay synology with 60TB usable, multiple docker containers running for tools as part of my setup.

One benefit of a NAS: my data's robust against any single drive dying, which is something that's happened to me, friends, and family.

A toaster box NAS with hotswap drives, RAID, and support for Android and iOS is a reality.