My family relies heavily on Google One to sync our Google Photos. We have 4 iOS and 5 Android devices. Originally the iOS folks would pay and sync through iCloud. But to simplify the billing process and easy sharing, we switched all to Google Photos. Lets just say there is almost 2TB of photos/videos.
We want to move away from this to a more controlled (self host) and non Google solution. We looked at Proton, their emails and vpns are great. However we dont want to move to a different cloud for photos and videos.
We are not very tech savy to set things up. Can we just buy a big hard drive and somehow hook it to our wifi? This is consider self hosted right? Does that mean medias will only get synced when we are within the house’s wifi?
Appreciate any inputs
Synology has started enshittifying their products lately by forcing you to only use their hard drives, etc. I have a DS933+, but I’m only using it for file storage and trying not to lock myself into their apps. It works well, but to avoid lock in your only real option is open source.
You may be out of the loop, but Synology walked that back after the backlash they got. You can use any drive again.
I read that they walked it back but only partially. And the fact they tried it tells me they can’t be trusted with my data.
They also make it very difficult to move your data off their NAS once it’s on there, because everything is proprietary.
Your best option remains open source with commodity hardware. Had I known what I know now in 2023, I would have probably just built a low power PC server with TruNAS.