[mwidell]

Don't complicate things. I did lots of research of different NAS solutions etc. but in the end I just got a huge external USB drive and then automatic backup with backblaze for $60 per year. Works great and super cheap, plus I have offsite backup in case of fire or theft.

[ghaff]

And you can add one or two additional USB drives for redundancy. I suspect that a lot of people building NASs using btrfs configured as RAID whatever would be better with a few local USB drives plus Backblaze.

[horsawlarway]

I did the whole "Save it to a large usb drive" method for backing up personal files for a while.

I finally upgraded to a synology nas and I feel a little silly for not doing it earlier.

It's far more convenient given I bounce between 3 machines during the day (personal laptop, work laptop, desktop), my wife can easily access files on her machines as well.

Added bonuses are that it comes back up on its own after a power outage, doesn't require my desktop to be on for me to hit it externally or for a successful backup, and I don't have to remember where I last placed the usb drive.

Basically - USB drives totally work, but the NAS is better in pretty much every way outside of price (and possibly some configuration, if the person isn't very technical).

[mackrevinack]

you can still make good use of the usb drive with hyperbackup on synology! i have a backup job set to run nightly but keep the drive disconnected (so something like a powersurge can't take out all the disks at once) and then once a month plug in the drive before i go to sleep then plug it back out the next day. the backup job gracefully fails for the rest of the month when the drive is not plugged in, but basically it just means i don't have to log into the synology just to run the backup job.

i have a second drive with an identical backup job and the drive lives in my sister's house 364 days of the year.

there's still the risk of losing a months worth of files but its a pretty low effort and cheap backup system apart from that

[ubermonkey]

Yeah, this.

My old laptop is effectively my NAS server.

[ksec]

1. I will need to connect to USB every time I use the file.

2. Wireless HDD are expensive. I think most people actually dont need NAS where the files are shared by everyone in the network. They just want to wireless access their personal file.