Why I Built My Own Personal Cloud
Why my Network Attached Storage (NAS) device is my cost effective, preferred storage, and main service solution to the big cloud providers.
What is Network Attached Storage (NAS)?
Network attached storage (NAS) is a high-capacity storage device that connects to your local network and can store various data files. These systems can be built with open-source programs (such as TrueNAS) or with a third-party solution (such as Synology). I personally use a Synology DiskStation which works only with a Synology drive bay product, like the one in the headline photo of this article. However, I know several people who have used an old computer or built a custom system with TrueNAS and have a great experience too.
I am most familiar with Synology services and that is what I use personally, so most of my comments will be addressing those features. In addition, almost all of these services can be found in multiple shapes and forms in other NAS solutions, such as “Plugins” for the freely available TrueNAS.
Benefits of a Personal NAS System:
1) I Own My Data
“Why is Google offering such a feature-rich [photos] product that doesn’t appear to be readily monetizable, outside of the few print photo books the company plans to sell? The simplest answer is that the company wants to keep people within its all-encompassing ecosystem. Today’s tech giants now offer to serve as caretakers to our digital lives across a suite of services in exchange for access to our personal information.”
Why Google Is Suddenly Obsessed With Your Photos — The Ringer
The most important benefit to me is that I own my own data. For example, I am able to back up all of my photos from my phone, computers, and tablet. I know where the data is being housed and how it is being used. In the end I get to choose how I want my data stored and I feel like I haven’t given any functionality up in order to achieve that.
2) No Subscription Fees
Nowadays, almost all of the major technology providers (Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.) are charging subscriptions for extended access to their products. For example, Google charges $1.99 per month in the United States for 100GB of storage.
Let’s do some quick math — a quick search on Amazon.com shows that I can get a cheap external 100GB USB plug hard drive for $14.48 USD as of the time this article was written. At $1.99/month, that means it would take just over seven months (7.27, to be exact) to break even on the cost of the hard drive. Seems like simply copying your files over every once and a while to a hard drive is a pretty good deal to me.
When using an NAS system, you usually have the data replicated for failure protection. You would probably also be buying NAS-Grade hard drives, which cost more but you get increased durability as these drives are specifically designed for continuous use. With these costs and quality products also comes a longer lifespan and increased number of services you can use with an NAS software platform. Of course, if you already have old hard drives or even an old computer, you can potentially even start using those for your own at-home cloud service with TrueNAS.
3) Easy to Replicate and Expand Storage
The key acronym here is RAID, which stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. A RAID setup means that given two hard drives (or more), data from one is replicated over to another. What does this get us?
RAID enables us to simply swap one hard disk for another without losing any data. If you have two 10 terabyte hard drives and one suddenly suffers a fatal error and stops working, have no fear! With a RAID set up, your data is still safe and sound in the second hard drive. By simply replacing the drive with a drive of at least 10 terabytes, the NAS system copies the data from the remaining working drive to the new drive. Once the copy is complete, you are back to your original data redundancy.
For me, this feature was also handy in expanding my drives from 4 terabytes to 12 terabyte drives on my Synology DiskStation. All I had to do is take the drive out, plug a new one in, let the data copy over, and do the same for the remaining drive and I had full local data redundancy again.
4) Security Through Multi-Factor Authentication & Encryption
With great data comes great security needs. Thankfully, it’s easy to secure data from unwanted access through the use of multi-factor authentication (MFA). By using MFA, I can use an authentication provider, such as Microsoft Authenticator, to make sure I have a rotating security key as a secondary login. That way, in the unlikely event that someone was able to get my server address, username, and password, I have a secondary layer of protection.
In addition, NAS software can allow you to encrypt your data so that in the event someone somehow physically took a hard drive, they would not be able to access or read the data on the drive.
There are a lot of ways to safeguard your data, and no one way will be 100% foolproof. That’s why it’s important to layer different safeguards together in a sort of “Swiss-cheese” approach. You can easily see through one slice of Swiss cheese because of the holes in it but it’s much harder to see through multiple layers. By combining together multiple services, you greatly reduce the probability of data loss or unwanted access.
Great, now I’m hungry.
5) My Own Remote Computer
When I was doing machine and deep learning in the past or even playing some video games, I had to carry a powerful laptop with me, I was chained to my desktop, or I would rent compute on a cloud provider such as Amazon Web Services, Google Collab, etc. Let’s be clear that there are some significant benefits to having your machine learning compute be available in the cloud but when I don’t need 4 graphics cards and 200 gigabytes of RAM for a couple of hours, most of the time my Linux machine has all of the compute that I would need to comfortably code remotely.
By using a VPN to securely connect to my home network over the internet, I can code and test my models or programs on a lightweight laptop remotely. This is a game changer — now not only do I have the option to bring up large compute and use a cloud service like AWS to host websites and do all of the heavy lifting for me for production, but I can use my local compute environment to quickly develop mid-level complexity projects and proof of concepts. The bonus is I can do this anywhere I get an internet connection.
What do I need to make this work?
In order to make these solutions work, you will need to provide a computing system for them to operate on. For a solution like TrueNAS, it can be an old computer. For a 3rd party solution like Synology, it is done via the purchase of a Synology DiskStation, which can house multiple hard drives, depending on the size of the unit that you purchase. Then, Synology provides the software, CPU, RAM, and other computing essentials for you. All you need to worry about is the hard drives that you are using.
Bonus: NAS Software Comparable to the “Big Guys”
In addition to all of these benefits, there are many software platforms and plugins to an NAS system that allow me to do things such as:
- Document Syncing Across Devices (Like Microsoft Office File Sync)
- Document Collaboration (Like Google Docs)
- Automatic Photo Backup (Like Google Photos)
- Virtual Private Network (Like NordVPN or Surfshark)
I’ll make sure to cover how I personally use these in a future post.
