The Synology End Game

I don't have any personal experience, but I passively follow video editor YouTube and everybody's talking about switching to a UNAS Pro[1], which integrates tightly with the UniFi gear people already love.

I'm happy to see it—looks great, it's priced insanely well, and I can see myself switching from Synology in the future.

In other news, I've been a fan of LucidLink[2] for awhile, which you can use to avoid needing a NAS for video editing workflows, and a very slick competitor finally came onto the scene[3]. LucidLink totally works, but their software is frustratingly idiosyncratic.

These services offer some kind of chunked file streaming magic that lets you progressively download pieces of video files as you need them.

I was somewhat surprised to discover, however, that there doesn't appear to be an open source project that provides this functionality.

Anybody know of anything? And I wonder if anyone's looked into it and knows how it works?

[1] https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/unas-pro

[2] https://www.lucidlink.com/

[3] https://shade.inc

I do video postproduction and am trying to archive/backup 100-250GB of large files per month. Ended up very slowly rsyncing to Synology NAS, confirming checksums with another script, using Synology onboard stuff to backup to AWS, and dealing with all the totally random hard drive noise.

If I want to work on one of these old projects, I have to download it locally so 4K editing works.

Meanwhile my old projects back when I used different software are impossible to open.

I have spent days setting up all this junk, HATE the Synology UI, and regret it all.

What’s the better solution? Just a bunch of RAIDs that I connect to with USB??