In recent years, I’ve tried several NAS systems: Synology, QNAP, NextCloud, and OpenMediaVault. I can only advise against Synology and QNAP; you pay a lot of money for a more or less nice enclosure, but the underlying software is outdated, and the performance compared to open-source alternatives is subpar.
Two open-source alternatives are NextCloud and OpenMediaVault. They have a major disadvantage: you can’t buy them with hardware. The software is available for free online, but you have to source the hardware yourself. This is, of course, a hurdle. I’ve had very good experiences with NextCloudPi. It’s like a local Dropbox at home for very little money. However, strictly speaking, NextCloud is not a NAS but just cloud software. Setting up a shared folder that you can mount as a drive involves a bit more effort. But it does offer software that you can install on your phone and computer to sync part of your hard drive.
OpenMediaVault offers exactly that: a hard drive on your own network, but lacks what NextCloud offers. There’s no software for mobile or desktop, drives must be manually mounted, and nothing gets synchronized. OpenMediaVault requires Debian, whereas NextCloud is more flexible. However, OpenMediaVault isn’t particularly resource-hungry. I haven’t yet been able to stress my installation on the Raspberry Pi 4 with 2GB. Outside the network, you can only access your files via VPN, which is not included and must be installed either through the router or another system. OpenMediaVault is compatible with Apple TimeMachine!
To summarize, I would describe it like this:
- Avoid buying systems as much as possible and save a lot of money.
- NextCloud is great if you want an alternative to a cloud service.
- OpenMediaVault is good if you need shared drives.
For both systems, NextCloud and OpenMediaVault, you still need some other system to back up your data. Yes, you may have your data stored locally on a second medium, but if your house burns down, you have a problem.