The Synology End Game

A big part of the appeal of Synology was that you could just forget about it. I have a little one in the corner that's just been sitting there serving files out over SMB for years now. It doesn't need to do anything more and I don't need to think about it.

A lot of the alternatives being proposed are not so easy to maintain. A full general purpose OS install doesn't really take care of itself. And I don't have (and don't want) a 19-inch rack at home. Ever.

So what's the set-up-and-forget-until-it-gets-kicked-over option?

There isn't many, as stupid as it may sound, I keep burning CD/DVD/BluRay and piling up external drives.

Yes, it is a pain versus having a NAS, but at least I don't have to deal with this kind of stuff.

Are you sure they survive for the time period you intend them to? When I was a teenager, I though the DVDs and BluRays I burned would be forever - 15 years later I am very unhappy to find that some of them started to crack and flay - it's a pain to keep checking them. Nothing like the guarantees a NAS + Cloud backup could provide.

NAS also fail, and cloud backups can be taken away without notice.

Hence why multiple copies.

sure, but NAS and cloud doesn't fail at the same time. Also NAS provide some redundancy in-house as well. Whereas BluRay is a single copy - even if you burn multiple copies, they degrade at the same rate.