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I'm quite a fan of self-hosting, but I can certainly acknowledge that sometimes cloud solutions are better. But it's not fair to only compare to a Synology NAS. If you're fine just running a standard Linux distro, rather than Synology's software, you can do much better in terms of hardware, for much cheaper. An Optiplex is ~$100-150 on eBay, has better hardware, and you can either just save that money or invest it in more storage. It's worth acknowledging that it uses more power, but still, that's $300 less than the Synology up front. Some extra power draw doesn't add up that fast. Plus, IMO there's a lot of value in being able to control it all yourself. If something breaks (which isn't that common, assuming this simple setup) you can fix it yourself, and you have full control over your data. I'd like to emphasize that it's worth taking into account the time and stress to run a NAS, it's not a perfect fit for everyone, even technical people, and priorities vary from person to person, but assuming you're just running a basic NAS with Syncthing, especially if it's all in Docker, it's very simple and low-maintenance. Hell, use an RHEL clone and set up watchtower, and you can have automated updates for a decade - that is, until it's not supported anymore. Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with Synology NASes, I haven't used one myself. |