I've always had a relatively bad experience with NAS hardware. Not necessarily due to anything the hardware manufacturer could have done. I have lost entire enclosures to lightning strikes on more than one occasion. Everyone thinks their IT skills are hot shit until they wake up to a closet full of burned hardware in the morning. It is quite a humbling experience if you've never been through it before. There isn't any kind of semiconductor process tech, file system design or RAID configuration that can save you from this. An off-site backup is the only thing that would count, which brings me to my next point.

These days I just store my files in S3. Whether or not this actually costs me more money becomes a very irrelevant shade of grey once I factor in the value of my time and sanity. I prefer having the capability to store and retrieve large files, not spending time maintaining this capability. This is also my "off-site" backup. I am paying for my operational NAS and its backup effectively at the same time. No one doing DIY is remotely close to 99.999999999% durability, even with all the kings horses and men put together.

I often see this urgency with total control pushing tech people into the very systems of oppression they seek to avoid. Putting your bits in some blob storage provider like AWS is not "losing the game" unless you frame it that way in your head. You can frame it as "getting one over on the bad guys" if you are a little bit clever with how you approach the problem. You can compel Amazon host any kind of bits with a sprinkle of AES256 on the client. I've been a customer with them for over 15 years and not once have they rug pulled me. I've never seen a NAS-style solution survive that long without intervention.

I don't know dude I am running a NAS for my home, it has taken minimal maintenance. The main benefit is it's local on my LAN, so speed and latency are dictated by the drives and my switch not whatever is happening outside my home.

> Everyone thinks their IT skills are hot shit until they wake up to a closet full of burned hardware in the morning. It is quite a humbling experience if you've never been through it before.

> I've been a customer with them for over 15 years and not once have they rug pulled me.

I actually tend to agree with the thrust of your argument, but how is your view of getting your account banned different than others' view of managing a NAS?

> I have lost entire enclosures to lightning strikes on more than one occasion. Everyone thinks their IT skills are hot shit until they wake up to a closet full of burned hardware in the morning. It is quite a humbling experience if you've never been through it before. There isn't any kind of semiconductor process tech, file system design or RAID configuration that can save you from this.

A power surge protector?

I have a NAS at home with ZFS snapshots and nightly offsite backups. What's so hard about that, or how is it less durable than your S3 solution?