NAS, Your Private Cloud Server

As a professional software engineer, I’m always surprised by how many people still don’t have even a basic backup strategy – never mind versioned backups or redundancy. It’s one of those things people tend to ignore until something breaks. And by then? It’s usually too late.

With my recent change in employment, I decided it was the perfect time to do a full audit of my business systems. I wanted to identify any weak spots, tighten things up, and simplify wherever possible. That included everything from local storage to cloud dependencies – and even gave me a reason (not that I needed one) to invest in some new gear.

Enter the Synology NAS. I grabbed a 4-bay unit and filled it with multiple 4TB drives. I set it up with RAID for redundancy and configured it as a private cloud. It’s now running scheduled backups, file sharing, media hosting, and a handful of other services. It’s fast, flexible, and surprisingly easy to configure. And the price? Reasonable, especially for what I’m getting out of it.

One unexpected bonus: having this setup made it easier to take a hard look at my third-party cloud services too. I was able to reevaluate which ones I actually need and start pulling back some of the data I’d been blindly trusting to live “out there.” I’m not going full off-grid or anything, but it feels good knowing I’ve got local, versioned copies of what matters – under my control.

I’ve also started playing around with the server packages Synology offers – Docker support is built-in, so the sky’s the limit. This little box is already doing a lot, but I suspect I’m just scratching the surface.

All in all, it’s been a worthwhile project. Peace of mind, some fun tech, and a cleaner, leaner business stack as a result.

#StayFrosty!

J

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PS. If you’d like to know more about setting up a NAS, let me know.