10 reasons why choosing a private storage — NAS rather than public storage services
Data is control. Whoever controls our data, controls us and that’s a problem. We are censored and shutdown occasionally. Services that we enjoy dies and our data vanishes. Remember Donald Trump? Remember Megaupload.com? Google Music?
What would you do if your country decides to shut down google services? it almost happened in Australia. How about facebook? Well, it can happen if China or Russia took over your country for example. That’s the status Quo in the middle/far east.
Things were different
Do you remember eMule or KaZaa heydays, when people controlled their data? We lost this battle and now we are slaves of the public cloud. Bombarded everyday with buzz words when in reality, they are a pile of buggy apps with zero respect for privacy.
There are the positive aspects of public cloud. However, this model is not implemented correctly and I am planning to elaborate about this topic on my next post.
I started to control my data
I bought the Synology DS720+. 2 weeks after experiencing it, I decided to abandon the Public cloud experience for backup and streaming.
Google Music is dead and you lost all the uploaded music files!
Google announced the sunset of Google Music service! Before that, it was google Tracks, Flights…etc. Now google decided to stop the free photos backup service. Google controls what to keep and what to abandon. Guess what, that won’t happen if the user controls the data and the platform.
Google Free photos quota ends on July 2021
The average camera user needs more than 100GB of storage. Such users need to pay monthly in order to keep the service going with no privacy. If the user controls the data, then we all be rich as we decide whether to sell it or not!
Visit takeout.g oogle.com to download all of your data.
Personal storage is the safe solution to gain control over your data and privacy
As the years went by, My flash drives stacked and it became cumbersome to search for relevant files. Until one day, I decided to check-out the NAS market — AGAIN. I noticed that users agreed upon the fact that the Synology NAS had the best software and hardware so I decided to buy one in order to get rid of the public storage drive.
Synology NAS: What free private services I control?
Synology suggested more than what I’ve expected. I examined the DS720+ and I discovered that I can deploy the next services:
If you think that the public cloud can offer something that the private cloud sector cannot. Then let me know what it is and I will make millions of dollars out of it.
Hesham Yassin
I was amazed by the amount of features the Synology package center got!
If your house cought on fire, you will loose your data…
old school saying
A lot of people claim that the NAS solution is not fault tolerant; you may lose your data if your house burns down! Are they right? Certainly not, that was true many years ago. In todays technology, You can either go Hybrid or use awesome backup protocols (BTRFS/RAID/…) or a free remote NAS as a Backup. Or you can live in a house that doesn’t catch fire all the time 🙂
Higher Speed:
When connected in a LAN, the speed is of the order of magnitude. I have a GoPro camera that I can backup its 128GB in a couple of seconds thanks to my NAS. While I need to wait several hours when using a public storage service. Don’t think about the latency you would have when trying to load a heavy video from public cloud that is not cached.
If you are a developer, deploying and debugging your server on a local Docker is faster and cheaper.
Data Control:
You get your privacy back. No one is analyzing your private information. Moreover, in a NAS, you won’t lose any information if a service is discontinued. There even no such a thing discontinuing a service as happened to Google Music or Google Free photos backup.
Choose your content:
You are day-dreaming if you think you can store whatever you want in a paid public storage. Files such as encrypted Zip Files or executables are not allowed. Moreover, google will block a shared file if it went viral.
Endless free space:
In a NAS, your storage space is endless. 160TB is more than what you may need in a lifetime. However, In a public storage service, you need to pay a lot of cash and your hard-earned money won’t give you that much space.
Free music/Video service without aggressive tracks promotion:
Why paying a music service if it may be gone one day such as Google Music?! I stream music from my NAS using a Plex app. Synology got Synology Audio manager which is not that bad. However, I liked Plex more. Some would argue about new music. Yes, Spotify suggests new music for you all the time. At least that’s what you think. Well, they are promoting sales! Ads, the sickness of the time.
Privacy:
Corporates are making trillions out of our private data. They decide what we can store, access, keep or share. If the personal cloud was the mainstream, the user is stronger and can profit from the private data instead of giving it for free. Platforms will be based on p2p and blockchain on steroids approach. The users will be in control.
Security:
We hear about data leaks all the time. In a NAS, you can secure your data and back it up in a way that a ransomware won’t be able to ruin your party. This is where fancy protocols such as BTRFS come in handy. In a public cloud service, if an employee misconfigured a storage or deleted a database production, well, your data will be lost. I heard about many accidents where people lost their public storage cloud content. I am someone who lost 10GB of photos backed up on Apple cloud and Samsung cloud.
Availability:
When the internet service is disconnected, you still have access to your NAS inside your LAN. Outside your LAN, as long as your internet provider is up, your content is available to you. Public cloud services promise SLA of 99.95% of availability per month which is 21min of downtime allowed. We all know this is bullshit. We experienced Google outages for hours.
Save your hard earned money:
After I bought my NAS, I got rid of my monthly subscription for 200GB of Google storage(4$), Google music(7$), GCP (30–70$).
Awesome integrated apps:
Synology Moments, Notes, Office, Contacts, Mail, Plex, Videos, Git Server, Docker, Moments AI Service and it is all for free. Take control over your data already! You can decide whether to sell it or not. In the meanwhile, giants are making millions out of our privacy.
Originally published at http://exhesham.com on April 12, 2021.
