Except a lot of it doesn’t fit because tons of it is predatory trash sold as functional when one or two things can go wrong and ruin everything.
It’s hard to expect the layman to need something technical, not know enough technically to do it themselves, but have enough surface knowledge to not get ripped off. It’s like threading a needle of the perfect level of wisdom.
Like I’d wager the common every dude would look for a connected hard drive, maybe Western Digital because of the market saturation, but there’s just so much garbage online that half works.
Then there’s interconnectivity issues, software not being available cross-platform after already spending hundreds on hardware, Apple problems.
The average user is just set and ready to be ripped off at like, all angles.
Yup, and that’s why I largely recommend DIY. If you commit to DIY, you will do the necessary research to not get too ripped off, and you can usually start w/ stuff you have laying around anyway. In my case, I upgraded my old Phenom II from 15 years ago to a Ryzen 1700, so I used the old Phenom PC as my NAS and just needed to buy some drives (got WD Reds). I have since upgraded my 1700, so now that’s what’s in my NAS.
If you’re unwilling to put in the work to DIY, I recommend cloud services instead. This solves two problems:
unsophisticated NAS owner likely won’t do regular offsite backups
no hardware to get screwed on
So either commit to DIY, or use off-the-shelf cloud products. I cannot recommend anything in between.
Except a lot of it doesn’t fit because tons of it is predatory trash sold as functional when one or two things can go wrong and ruin everything.
It’s hard to expect the layman to need something technical, not know enough technically to do it themselves, but have enough surface knowledge to not get ripped off. It’s like threading a needle of the perfect level of wisdom.
Like I’d wager the common every dude would look for a connected hard drive, maybe Western Digital because of the market saturation, but there’s just so much garbage online that half works.
Then there’s interconnectivity issues, software not being available cross-platform after already spending hundreds on hardware, Apple problems.
The average user is just set and ready to be ripped off at like, all angles.
Yup, and that’s why I largely recommend DIY. If you commit to DIY, you will do the necessary research to not get too ripped off, and you can usually start w/ stuff you have laying around anyway. In my case, I upgraded my old Phenom II from 15 years ago to a Ryzen 1700, so I used the old Phenom PC as my NAS and just needed to buy some drives (got WD Reds). I have since upgraded my 1700, so now that’s what’s in my NAS.
If you’re unwilling to put in the work to DIY, I recommend cloud services instead. This solves two problems:
So either commit to DIY, or use off-the-shelf cloud products. I cannot recommend anything in between.