What are your thoughts on finding a good level of subscriptions for online services, such as storage, photo backup, music streaming, video streaming?
Personal situation: I don’t want a ton of subscriptions. I take lots of photos. I listen to music quite a bit. I live in a household that has Android, iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, Linux, … and a Synology NAS that is already filling up with old music and video stuff from before streaming, phone photo backups as well as the photos from the big camera (manually copied so far). I currently pay for two cloud storage thingies and have to free ones, 3/4 are full :P We also have Spotify Family and cut down to only (HBO) Max and public service for video plus sometimes getting something specific for a month or two.
Any experiences or other observations welcome as well!
Why wouldn’t you just add more storage to your NAS?
That usually involves replacing drives, and drives get expensive fast. Synogy and all the other NAS makers won’t make a >4 bay NAS without charging an arm and a leg for them. Then there’s the cost of replacing a perfectly good hard drive with another of a large capacity. And because you want redundancy that doesn’t mean just one drive, that meant at least 2 possibly all 4 drives.
So far the NAS is not reachable from the internet and knowing how many threats lurk out there I’m sort of happy with that. I still want to do backups as well es find photos when I’m e.g. visiting family or simply traveling.