I swear by my NAS, but I wouldn’t trust it without a Google One subscription

I grew up in the physical media era when every document and file I owned was stored on a device I could physically hold in my hands. Stacks of floppy disks, tower racks full of CDs, several external hard disks, and dozens of USB sticks and SD cards; I’ve had them all, carried them all, and saved my data on them all.

But as the years progressed, I saw myself shift more towards the cloud. The convenience of accessing everything from anywhere without having to physically carry it was life-changing around the late 2000s with the arrival of Dropbox. I could work on my pharmacology thesis and hospital study cases from the university’s computer and then continue writing from my laptop at home. It was such a fantastic commodity. Still, I made the effort to keep a local copy of everything — I was still very skeptical of tech and lived in a country where the average connection speed was still 2Mbps in 2020 and where electricity blackouts were a way of life, so I had to have backups everywhere and local access to everything.

The immutable reality is that tech breaks, so my current data and streaming strategy is still that same two-fold approach many decades later: local and cloud-based. But things have evolved a lot since the late 2000s. I have had a Synology NAS for a few years, and I’ve been subscribed to Google One for a couple of years. I’m a convert to both. Why pay for two storage solutions? Well, peace of mind and versatility. And, as much as I applaud my colleague Rob for completely cutting the cord and going full-steam with his self-built NAS, I am still a creature of convenience and fear. I’d rather pay a bit more for a convenient and ready-made NAS and I still don’t trust tech enough to keep my data in one place and on one medium.

I had wanted network storage in my home for years, but creating my own solution with a DAS turned into a NAS or building my own NAS using some ready-made NAS software felt a bit too next-level for my tech skills and too involved to maintain. I didn’t want to worry about the upkeep or troubleshooting by myself, so I went for a midrange Synology NAS that I instantly loved.

I moved to a more capable Synology DS220+ in 2021 with a better processor and more RAM. It only has two disc bays, but that’s enough for my and my husband’s storage needs. We bought 8TB drives for each bay and set them up in a RAID 1 configuration, where each drive acts as redundancy for the other one. This guarantees that I have two local copies of my data at all times, so if one disk fails, I can switch to another new drive without losing anything.

For now, I’ve stuck with hard disks in my NAS, not SSDs, given the high cost of SSDs and their limited benefit if you use them for idle background storage as I do and set up a redundancy backup in case one of them breaks. HDDs are plenty fast for my daily needs and are OK for my basic video streaming and storage use. If you work a lot with video or you’re constantly saving, moving, and editing files, an SSD would be a wiser choice. I’m sure I’ll upgrade to SSDs at some point in the future, but for now, HDDs it is.

It took me a while when I set up my first Synology NAS to get comfortable with it, but now, I’ve gotten used to both its quirks and hidden powers. A NAS has a million advantages, depending on your needs. For me, this is the second brain of my personal life, work life, entertainment, and security system. My husband and I use it to store files, photos, important documents, media, as well as our security camera feed. It handles all of those with seamless ease.

The first thing I’ve done on my Synology is set up separate directories for my husband and me, plus a common joint one; that way, we don’t mess up each other’s files by mistake. We also quickly realized that the best way to deal with files is not through Synology’s Windows XP-inspired web interface. That is dead slow, annoying to use, and shortcut-less (or has so few keyboard shortcuts that it’s almost useless). Instead, my Synology is accessible over the local network and mounted straight into Finder on my iMac and MacBook, as well as File Explorer on my husband’s ACER laptop. That way, we can move, rename, organize, and access all our files in a snap, almost as if they were stored locally on our computers. I can also do all of that from the DS File app on my Android phones and tablets.

Synology also offers a Google Drive competitor with document and spreadsheet editing, but I haven’t touched it yet in all my years because I’m sitting firmly in the Google Drive camp (more on that later). I always have my eye on Synology Drive, but I guess I’ll only really make the switch if Google adds some deal-breaker to its own suite. Until then, sorry, Syno.

Photos are a whole other beast because I rely on the cloud and Google Photos for 95% of my active photo needs. Still, every time I get a new Android phone, I set up the Photo backup option inside DS File and let it automatically save all the photos and videos I take in full-res to a new folder on my NAS. I don’t bother organizing those — there isn’t enough time in the world — but at least I know everything is backed up, and I can search for any file by name or date in an instant. My only organization trick is creating a new “From [phone_name]” subfolder in my Synology’s photos directory for each new phone. That’s the extent of my active involvement.

I have also set up Synology’s own Photos app, which has facial recognition, places, and tags, but it’s so basic compared to Google Photos that I rarely bother with it. If you don’t want to sell your soul to the Google overlords, though, it can do the trick, provided you’re patient enough to merge all the dupe faces it fails to categorize under the same name.

My third biggest Synology use case revolves around security. I’ve set up a standalone alarm and security system at home, but I also have a powerful but affordable TP-Link C225 camera ($55 on Amazon) that I turn on when I’m away. It stores everything on a microSD card and is accessible over its own app, but I also save its stream to my Synology NAS. That way, if a thief comes in and unplugs the cam, I still have a backup on my NAS. I chose the Tapo C225 specifically because of its features (rotation, privacy mode, 2K, night vision) and its ONVIF support. Thanks to that protocol, I was able to set it up inside Synology’s Surveillance Station and started using my large 8TB drives as storage for my cam’s security feed.

Like most people with a NAS, I use it as a media center, too. My colleague Rob swears by JellyFin, but I opted for Plex at some point in the early 2010s when I lived in Lebanon (where piracy was the only option to access new music, shows, and movies), got the lifetime subscription at a ridiculously low price that I can’t remember anymore, and I haven’t found a reason to switch since then. I still use Plex and my accumulated media library from that time, though my streaming habits have evolved since.

Now, I stream a lot of what I watch. I’d say that 50% of what I watch goes through a YouTube Premium Family plan (my husband and I love many food, travel, interior decor, sports, and tech creators there) and 30% through our Canal+ subscription (a local French TV provider for live sports like La Liga, the Premier League, and the Champions League). The remaining 20% is divided between our Plex server, the free Apple TV Plus subscription we get thanks to Canal+, and the free Amazon Prime Video sub we get with our Amazon Prime. I still absolutely hate the interface of every streaming service I use, though, and find them all completely inefficient for tracking what I’m watching. Plex is miles ahead; Trakt helps, too.

For music, we have a Spotify Duo sub, a great price compromise for couples who don’t want to pay individually or splurge on a Family plan. It’s Spotify for me all the way (I follow a lot of community-made playlists around the Eurovision national final season every year that I just don’t want to bother creating on my own), whereas my husband goes for a mix of Spotify and YouTube Premium.

Of course, there are ways to do all of that with just a NAS if you buy digital media to keep forever instead of streaming, or use your ingenuity to unearth content ‘for free.’ For us, though, having both a NAS and some subscriptions has been a sweet compromise between convenience and offline access.

Although my Synology NAS is my second — sometimes first, if I’m honest — brain, I still don’t rely on it for everything. For me, storing data is half the equation; using it is the second half. That’s why I don’t use Synology’s expensive C2 Storage plans; they would provide me with no added convenience compared to my local NAS, and their only benefit would be creating an off-site backup for all of my data.

However, not all of my data needs to be backed up a dozen times; only a few dozen GBs do. So, instead of paying for my NAS-provided cloud backup solution, I opted for the convenience and utility of Google’s cloud services. I was lured by the free 15GB Gmail account many years ago, got used to its features, and after I repeatedly hit the cap and skated it by deleting big files here and there, I eventually capitulated and signed up for the $2 monthly 100GB family subscription with my husband.

Plus, there are several instances where you can hit the limit of what NAS storage allows you to do if you don’t want to waste hours babysitting your data like a helicopter parent with their first newborn. That’s where cloud storage like Google One can take the wheel and guide you with a lot of smart and extra features. But first and foremost, backups!

Not every document or media file I own is saved on my Google One account, but the documents I frequently need or want to have access to, even if my Synology is offline or unreachable for some reason, are all there. At first, I thought that this would be the secondary way we access our files, but more often than not, it’s become the primary one.

As I’m writing this, I just literally came back from the pharmacy where I went to pick up my asthma meds. I had my prescription paper, but as I opened it at the counter, I realized it was the old one. So I simply pulled up the Google Drive app on my phone, found the new prescription, and emailed it to the pharmacy on the spot. Could I have done it from Synology’s DS File, too? Yes. But Google Drive is simply faster.

So yes, there are many folders and documents that are shared between the cloud and my NAS, and I appreciate that I get the convenience of fast access with Google One, the peace of mind of physically owning the document on a local drive, and the serenity of having my data in two different places on two different mediums. I know that the best backup strategy usually requires a third backup, but for now, two is enough work and expense for me.

Perhaps the single reason I could never unsubscribe from Google One is Photos. Google dangled a noose in front of my neck with that service; I slipped my head in willfully and gave it full control. I love Google Photos, its features, its albums (manual, smart, or shared), its fun memories and funky creations, its smart organization by place and thing, its facial recognition, and more. I do, however, limit uploads to the Storage saver quality; the compression there is a good enough compromise for me.

Photos and videos are the most personal, human, affectionate data I will ever own, and Google Photos has my personal story, from my early university days to my year studying abroad, my first trips, hundreds of hikes, my first photos with my husband, our wedding, our move to France, and so much more. The first photos I took when I bought my pharmacy, how I renovated it, how I filled it up with meds and got it running, then 10 years later, the empty shelves when I decided to sell it. It has my apartment in Lebanon, my rental in Paris, then my new home, and all the stages of my adult life. But most importantly, it has the people. Several of them are now deceased, and many more are thankfully still alive. I can’t forget how it face-matched a black-and-white super-old photo of my father-in-law in his 20s with all the photos I’ve taken of him in his 80s. It just knew! Photos also has the map of every photo I’ve taken and my path around this home we call Earth.

Plus, Photos integrates with the screensaver mode on my Nest Hub, Pixel Tablet, and Google TV Streamer. I’ve picked up a few albums to rotate, and every time I come back from an event or trip, I find the photos there, in my home, greeting me. You can’t put a price on that.

Yes, as I said earlier, Synology Photos exists, and more competing services are sprawling up, but do they require work? Yes. Are they as good as Google Photos after you’ve put in all the effort of verifying and organizing everything? No. So there you go. Take my money, Google.

Here, too, alternatives exist, and Synology has its own in the form of Synology Drive, but you can’t beat the convenience and universality of Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Everyone has a Google account. Hence, everyone can view a document or spreadsheet I share, edit it, and work on it with me, suggest comments and changes, and collaborate live and quickly. It works on the web, no app necessary, on every desktop platform, and on every mobile platform. Android, iOS, tablets, iPads, Chromebooks, and so on. As I said, for me working with data isn’t just about safeguarding it, but also conveniently using it, and Google Drive is the epitome of that. Plus, my husband and I swear by our shared spreadsheets for tracking things like escape rooms we’ve played, events and concerts we’ve attended, pantry items and expiry dates, and our extensive collection of liqueurs and cocktail ingredients.

Beyond just documents, Drive is excellent for folder sharing, too. There’s a fun story about how I resurrected my mom’s (slow typer, high school advanced chemistry-level teacher) disappeared 4-page chemistry exam that was full of formulas and super-superscripts and sub-subscripts, and that had taken her two full days to type, all by going to our shared Google Drive folder’s trash, finding the .temp file that Word had saved on her computer while she was working on it, which was then backed up to Google Drive. I converted the .temp back to .docx and remotely put it back in the folder for her. To this day, I’m her personal hero.

I’ll say, though, that I do make an effort to save many of my important collaboration documents and spreadsheets as PDFs and throw them on my Synology NAS. That way, I’m not just relying on Google’s servers and I always have a local file to access should the need arise.

Finally, the last reason why I couldn’t give up my Google One subscription is backups of a different nature. My Android phones and tablets, as well as several apps I use like WhatsApp, resort to Google Drive — and thus my Google One storage space — to save their backups. I’m not your typical tech journalist who changes phones every three days, but I do switch more frequently than the average Joe, so having those phone backups ready when I don’t want to bother setting up a phone from scratch or when I want to recover an important piece of info is crucial.

If you’re considering setting up a NAS — be it a Synology, a different brand, or even a self-built NAS — as well as subscribing to cloud storage, my first piece of advice would be to make sure you can create some kind of sync rules between the two. No one ever wants to manually copy or back up every file and change they’ve made from one platform to another. Yes, create automatic rules to save secondary backups of those folders, but your main folders should be live-syncing to save you time and headaches.

That’s why I use Synology’s CloudSync service to keep several important folders running spick-and-span between my personal Google account and the one I share with my husband. We put a document in one place, and it automatically gets saved to the other; we don’t have to think about it, manually remember to do it, or anything.

I’ve also created several local synchronizations between my iMac/MacBook and my Synology NAS or Google One storage. I use Synology’s Drive Client to make sure my Android Authority work folder is synced locally on my computer. My article photos and screenshots, videos, ideas, random Photoshop attempts — all of that lives on the NAS and both computers. That way, I have a third backup of sorts, but I also don’t need to wait for files to load, even on a fast local network connection. Plus, when I’m working away from home, attending events like MWC or IFA, I know that everything I do will also be immediately saved on my NAS. This also allows me to seamlessly switch between my desktop iMac and my MacBook without giving it a second thought.

Finally, I’ve also integrated Google Drive into Finder on my Macs, so I can always access files that way. The web interface is for beginners; the file browser is where it’s at. I can’t tell you how many times a day I use that — hint: it’s more than a dozen probably. From saving event tickets straight into my shared Events folder with my husband to keeping bank statements, health records, work invoices, press releases, and more, there’s no day that doesn’t pass without me clicking on Google Drive to save, move, or check a file.

For me, the two — a NAS and a cloud storage subscription — are inseparable. If you can make them work together, they’re a very powerful combo that can make any computer or any phone your immediate ally. I can get up and running on a new Mac, Windows, Chrome OS, Linux, Android, iOS, iPadOS, or whatever platform you throw my way in minutes with both my personal and work files. There’s no serenity or personal digital power bigger than that.

I have already written more than 3000 words about dual-yielding a NAS and a Google One subscription, but if I were to sum it up in some succinct form, it would be this:

• With my Synology NAS and my Google One account, my most important data is saved in at least two different locations with redundancy.
• I get easy and fast access to everything I need and care about on my computers and phones, at home or away, and I can quickly download, upload, save, sync, change, and edit without a hitch.
• I have the benefit of offline access through Synology, and the serenity of knowing my data is physically with me, not only trusted to a cloud server somewhere. I can also upgrade my NAS storage at a relatively cheap one-time cost, save full-resolution copies of all my photos and videos, and use the remaining storage for security cams, smart home setups, and media centers.
• I also have the benefit of cloud access and all the privileges that a Google One subscription brings, from Drive collaboration to the invaluable Photos experience.
• I’ve created a mash-up of synced folders and redundant backups that ensure my most-used folders, whether they’re stored on the NAS, the cloud, or both, are also available on my computers at all times and always in sync with each other.

Oh, so now we get to the real crux of the issue: money. Obviously, all of this isn’t cheap, but I think I’ve hit the sweet spot between power and features, all without requiring too much of my personal time for maintenance or upkeep.

Let’s break down the NAS cost first. The DS220+ was priced at $299 when I got it in 2021, and the 8TB drives cost me $85 each. That’s $469 total over four years so far, and still going strong. Right now, if you want something newer and similar, you can grab the Synology DS223 for $249 on Amazon and a pair of 8TB Seagate Barracuda HDDs for $109.99 each (better prices can be found sometimes). Of course, you have to add up a few dozen hours to get everything set up, but we’ll chalk that off as the geek tax.

On the upside, having this large NAS storage has helped me save by opting for the cheapest 128GB iMac M1 and MacBook M4 configurations when I bought my computers. I didn’t have to pay the Apple extra storage tax on top of the expensive Apple Mac tax; I just went for the lowest storage option, knowing I could offload the biggest files to my 8TB drives in a wink.

For cloud storage, I’m sticking to the 100GB Google One plan for as long as I can, and that means paying $19.99 every year. If I were to backup all my current NAS files to Google, I would need the $249.99 5TB yearly One plan, which equals the price of a brand-new diskless DS223. The NAS was a one-time purchase, while the Google One subscription would have to be paid yearly — oof! Of course, that’s not an option I’m ever considering. I’m happy sticking with the storage-saver Photos uploads and only using Google for the most important documents to keep my cheap Google One tier, leaving the rest to my NAS.

Overall, this is the strategy I would recommend to almost everyone because it’s a perfect balance. Opt for a midrange (although admittedly still expensive) NAS that churns continuously in the background, knowing you also have fast access to your most important files through a cheap, low-tier Google One subscription. The biggest files, high-resolution photos and videos, and less important data live on the NAS, while the cloud acts as your main access point for the smaller, daily-use files.

For most users, it makes no sense to pay for a more expensive Google One sub if you already bought a NAS with large multi-terabyte storage drives, nor does it make sense to get a super high-end NAS if you have a Google One subscription. Use your money wisely, but do what you need to protect your data.