Synology to replace Google storage and photos, as well as Dropbox \ stacker news ~tech

Synology to replace Google storage and photos, as well as Dropbox

401 sats \ 15 comments \ @south_korea_ln 18 Sep tech

A friend recently gave me his old Synology NAS. I bought a new hard drive for it and set it up. Started transferring all my pictures from Google onto it. First tests seem to show a very similar experience as the Google Photos interface. Will soon start transfering all my dropbox stuff too. Will incorporate redundancy by having it sync with another hard drive for important folders.

Other than the upfront cost of the hard drive, this seems it will pay off during within a year due to the expensive Dropbox plan I was on.

Is there anything i am missing, or does self hosting with Synology seems like the better option in many aspects compared to the cloud. Already feeling less dependent on Google is a huge plus.

Do you have experience with Synology? Any specific things to keep in mind so that i don't regret making the switch?

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156 sats \ 1 reply \ @nout 18 Sep

The main risk is when the NAS fails, or catches on fire or something. I recommend cloning all of the data once in a while onto some disks and storing those disks at your friends or family. I also recommend separating your private personal files and then public media (e.g. the things you can download again in the future from the internet - movies, music...)

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @south_korea_ln OP 19 Sep

Good advice. The backup part is my main concern.

165 sats \ 1 reply \ @siggy47 18 Sep

We have used a synology NAS for years in our home. Very easy to use with the phone apps. It also has been durable. We have used ours for probably 8 years. We only use it for photos and music files.

43 sats \ 0 replies \ @south_korea_ln OP 19 Sep

Yeah, the fact of being able to merge my pictures with my wife's looks pretty appealing too.

154 sats \ 1 reply \ @DesertDave 18 Sep

I have never heard of Synology. What type of system does it run on? I am running nextcloud on a pi3. It has been okay. Does this have features to organize photos?

11 sats \ 0 replies \ @south_korea_ln OP 19 Sep

The interface to interact with the pictures looks very similar to the one from Google. It reads the picture native metadata, and can also read in the json data that you get from a "google take out" dataset. I didn't test the json part though as I only care about having the pictures chronologically and I did not organize pictures by folders on Google (which would be stored in the json file, supposedly).

124 sats \ 1 reply \ @tolot 18 Sep

I feel that the REAL alternative to google apps for android is Nextcloud. Anything else is from slightly worse to considerably worse. If you've the opportunity, run Nextcloud.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @south_korea_ln OP 19 Sep

I'll look into Nextcloud, if only to see what it's all about. Here, Synology was the elected choice as that's what my friend gave me.

140 sats \ 1 reply \ @bitalion 18 Sep

That depends on how beneficial it is for you, having control of your data is the best; I imagine you can access it from the Internet, if so you have to establish good security although Synology provides several mechanisms for this.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @south_korea_ln OP 19 Sep

Good point about security, I still need to read up on what Synology offers.

79 sats \ 1 reply \ @Leonard 18 Sep

How much in TB do you need for 1 year let’s say?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @south_korea_ln OP 19 Sep

I currently have about 2.5T of data scattered amongst millions of files for work purposes. This remains fairly stable as I can delete the oldest data related to projects I have finished working on.

Photo storage is negligible in the grand scheme.

69 sats \ 1 reply \ @clarity 18 Sep

Just a thought on NAS’s in general, does it have RAID 0 or RAID 10 backup configuration available?

63 sats \ 0 replies \ @south_korea_ln OP 19 Sep

Just a thought on NAS’s in general, does it have RAID 0 or RAID 10 backup configuration available?

As I only have one hard drive slot in this Synology model, raid 10 is out of the picture...

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @ZezzebbulTheMysterious 20 Sep

Do not put end of life synology NASes on the internet. They will contain unpatched vulnerabilities, the device will get hacked and your data will get stolen lost or ransomed. Plenty of stories of it happening to folks. DSM 6.2 is EOL October 2024.