NAS (Network Attached Storage) is just that: computer storage attached to a network. In reality, it’s a specialty server. Having one is great since all of your devices can be given reasonably secure access to all of the files, whether on your home network or via the Internet. Even better, NAS devices have features like your own personal cloud, a git server, and more adding to the benefits. Synology makes some of the best NASes on the market at all price points.

NAS devices can also offer hardware redundancy and failure protection. That’s fancy tech talk for having an easy way to recover from hardware issues. There are many brands, but I’ve found Synology products to have a decent price/performance ratio, they’re relatively easy to set up, and they have a great feature set.

What’s it good for?

I use my NAS (a Synology DiskStation DS215j) as:

• File server
• Personal Cloud
  • Remote Cloud backup
• Git server
• Music server
• Note server
• Backup repository for Back in Time

and probably a few other things that don’t immediately come to mind. If you have any files you value, I highly recommend at least a minimal 2-drive NAS to put your important files onto. A 2-drive NAS allows you to mirror both drives (the data is on both and if one drive fails, you still have your data). Synology NASes make this easy to set up. Some of the other functions take a little more work, but they’re worth it if you need them.

• Take a look at what Synology offers: https://www.synology.com/en-us