Keep your photos private! Set up your own at-home NAS cloud alternative

NAS: Your own private cloud at home

NAS stands for Network Attached Storage. A NAS is basically a device that’s loaded with one or more storage drives and sits on a network (like your home Wi-Fi network), providing a central storage location that’s accessible by other devices on the same network. So, instead of uploading to Google’s or Apple’s servers, you can just upload to your NAS that’s only accessible to your own devices.

Keeping your data to yourself is the only way to make sure that no one else has access to it. What’s more, with your own NAS you always know exactly where your data is physically located. By contrast, a cloud platform with countless server farms distributed around the world could potentially keep your data in multiple locations and countries across multiple physical storage drives.

In short, you have to fully trust that your cloud provider has everything locked down, protected, and secure. If you have any doubts at all, you should set up your own NAS as a kind of private cloud storage.

Your first NAS: What you need to know

If you’re buying a NAS for private storage of data and photos, you should opt for a NAS that has at least two drive bays. Such devices are typically called “2-bay NAS” or “dual-bay NAS” in product listings.

Empty or pre-installed with drives

Furthermore, a NAS can be purchased with drives already included or as an “empty enclosure.” In the latter case, you’ll need to provide and install your own compatible drives, preferably two identical drives (in terms of capacity and model) from the same maker as your NAS if possible.

Installing drives in a NAS isn’t rocket science, and the procedure is usually well-documented in the NAS’s manual. Still, if you aren’t a tinkerer and don’t want to mess with that, you can just opt for a NAS model with pre-installed storage drives. (For entry-level NAS boxes, conventional 3.5-inch HDDs and SSDs are the storage media of choice.)

Photo and video management

Since the NAS will be used as a private cloud for photos, look for a NAS with a built-in photo management system that makes it easy to automatically transefr photos and videos from your phone to the NAS. Many NAS manufacturers offer companion apps (both Android and iPhone) for this purpose, and these apps also give you access to all photos and videos currently stored on the NAS.

Of course, you can also access your NAS photos from your PC, either via the web interface in a browser or directly via folder sharing in the network area of Windows File Explorer.

Remote access

Almost all NAS manufacturers now offer convenient and easy-to-set-up remote access for their NAS boxes, allowing you to access your files even while traveling. You’ll have to create a free user account with the NAS manufacturer, with which remote access to the network storage can be realized without fiddling with complicated router settings.

You can also use a NAS as a practical network drive and access or edit the data stored on it directly from your PC on the network. In fact, there are so many awesome ways to use a NAS at home.

USB port

Make sure the NAS has at least one USB port (ideally either USB 3.2 Gen 1 or Gen 2 for best performance). This USB port will allow you to connect an external USB storage device to the NAS box for making backups of NAS content or transferring data (e.g., photos, videos, documents) from the USB device directly to the NAS box.

Ethernet port

For entry-level NAS boxes, you can expect Gigabit Ethernet speeds, which can transfer at a maximum of 950 Mbps (or 118 MB/s). This transfer rate is sufficient for photo backups, for use as a media server, and for other common home network applications.

Faster NAS boxes with multi-gigabit Ethernet ports—which can transfer at 2.5 Gbps or even 5 Gbps—are generally more expensive and also require faster hardware on the home network with multi-gigabit-capable devices (e.g., routers, switches, PCs, laptops).

If you already have such devices, consider spending a little more money and investing in a NAS box with a multi-gigabit LAN port.

Pricing expectations

An entry-level dual-bay NAS with all the important features starts at around $130 to $200 for an empty enclosure. The entry-level price category includes dual-bay NAS devices from leading manufacturers like Qnap’s TS-233 and Synology’s DS223j as well as other affordable models like Asustor’s AS1102TL and Terramaster’s D2-320.

If you want to go a step up, there’s also Ugreen’s DXP2800, which is significantly more expensive at just over $350. However, this NAS also offers significantly better hardware features with a more powerful CPU, plenty of RAM, a fast 2.5 Gbps Ethernet connection, and two additional M.2 slots for fast NVMe SSD storage.

Remember, if you go with a diskless (empty) enclosure, you’ll also need to supply drives. Grabbing two hard drives could cost an additional $150 to $300 on top of the NAS box itself.

Data mirroring with RAID 1

When setting up the NAS, you’ll set up the NAS’s two drives in a so-called RAID 1 array, also known as “disk mirroring.” This makes it so that all your data stored on the NAS is mirrored on both drives—if one of the two drives ever fails, your data is still available on the other drive. For 4 TB of total storage in a 2-bay NAS with mirrored content via RAID 1, you’ll need 2 x 4 TB hard drives.

Note that some NAS manufacturers work with slightly modified or extended RAID 1 features, which have slightly different names. Synology, for example, uses the term “SHR” for “Synology Hybrid RAID” while Terramaster uses “TRAID” for “Terramaster RAID.”

We strongly advise you to only buy special NAS hard drives that are labeled as such by manufacturers like Seagate, Western Digital, or Toshiba. These NAS drives are designed for 24/7 continuous operation, have better vibration protection, and utilize advanced error correction, which is especially designed for use in a RAID network.

For example, Seagate has NAS-optimized drives called “Ironwolf” while Western Digital has “Red Plus” and Toshiba has “N300.” Meanwhile, Synology recently started offering its own NAS storage drives that are specially designed for its own NAS boxes.

Initializing your NAS box

The basic setup of a NAS that’s already connected to the router via LAN cable can usually be carried out via the web menu in a browser on any home network-connected PC or the companion phone app.

Browser access is usually done via a special URL, such as find.synology.com, or via a special NAS access tool that you can download from the NAS manufacturer’s homepage.

As soon as you call up the uninitialized NAS for the first time in the browser, via the NAS app, or via a NAS access tool, you’ll see a setup wizard for establishing basic settings and automatically downloading the most up-to-date NAS operating system. You’ll usually also setup the main user account or administrator account of your NAS. (Take note of the login credentials on a piece of paper or save it in your password manager, as it’ll be the only way to access the web menu of your NAS going forward. You’ll also need it to access shared folders and network drives on your NAS from File Explorer on a Windows PC.)

During initialization, you’ll usually be offered the opportunity to register with an account of the NAS manufacturer using an email address. You can then easily access the contents of your NAS, its settings, or the NAS photo management from outside your home network—and all this without having to fiddle with any settings on your router. This convenient access is highly recommended, especially for NAS beginners.

Setting up the storage

As soon as initialization is complete, you can log into the web menu of your NAS with your new login credentials.

With some models, the storage on the NAS is already set up during initialization and may also have at least one shared folder—often labeled “Public”—which is available for remote access. With Synology or Qnap, however, this isn’t the case. With these, you’ll be prompted to create a storage pool first. Fortunately, another wizard is available for this, which works through the necessary steps with you.

Setting up the storage with Qnap is a little tricky. With Qnap, you have to set up your storage with so-called “thick” or “thin” volumes if you want to use the snapshot feature later to quickly restore a storage image. This option is well-explained in the manual, and we recommend downloading the QTS operating system manual (PDF) from the manufacturer.

Entry-level NASes from other major manufacturers now all support the Btrfs file system, which has the snapshot feature integrated. You just need to make sure that you select the “Btrfs” file system when setting up the storage, which is usually the default option.

After creating the storage volume, you can then create shared folders, which are usually already equipped with write access rights for your main or administrator account.

Accessing shared folders on your NAS via File Explorer in Windows

To be able to access the shared folders of your NAS box from a Windows PC on the home network, first check in the NAS web menu whether the SMB service is activated.

To do this, open the system settings and enter the term “SMB” in the search field. Almost all entry-level NAS devices now have such a search mask, which makes it much easier to find certain settings in the sometimes very extensive web menus.

Also make sure that the “WS-Discovery” setting is activated (if available). This setting ensures that the NAS system is displayed in File Explorer on your Windows PC without having to use any special tricks.

Now, open File Explorer on your Windows PC with the Windows key + E keyboard shortcut and double-click on “Network” in the menu bar on the left. You will now see a list of all devices in your home network that have SMB folder shares, including your NAS. In the area on the right, you will find the same devices under the heading “Computer.”

The first time you click on the NAS from your Windows PC to access a shared folder, you’ll be asked for network credentials. This is the login for your NAS user account that you assigned during NAS setup (with which you also use to access the NAS web menu). Enter the login credentials in File Explorer to access the folder on the NAS.

Set up your network drive

You’ll now also see the shared folders of your network storage in the File Explorer window on the right side. They can be used like all other drives on your PC. You can access the files stored in them, open and edit them, save them again, copy them, and so on.

If you wish, you can also connect individual NAS folder shares as a network drive so that this folder share is displayed in your Windows PC as a “local” drive with a drive letter. To do this, right-click on one of the shared folders of your NAS in File Explorer and select the “Connect network drive” option in the context menu.

In the following window, assign a drive letter and then confirm by clicking on “Finish”. The folder share of your NAS now appears in File Explorer as a “normal” Windows drive on the left under “This PC.”

The advantage is that some apps and programs have problems accessing network drives or storing data to them. However, the assigned drive letter means that the NAS drive is regarded as a local storage location and is therefore accepted. Note, however, that access only works if your Windows PC is running on the home network and your NAS is on.

Manage photos on your NAS

To set up photo management, first go to the NAS apps section in the web menu of your NAS, which is called the “App Center” for Qnap and Ugreen and the “Package Center” for Synology. There you can install a photo management app with a few clicks (called “Synology Photos” for Synology, “Photos” for Ugreen, and “QuMagie” for Qnap). With Qnap, the “Multimedia Console” NAS app, which is required to run the image management, is also installed automatically.

Once installed, start the photo management app in the NAS web menu. Among other things, you’ll be asked whether a default shared folder has already been created for your image files on the NAS, or you’ll see a message to share an existing folder as a content source for your photos. With a Qnap NAS, you should also install “Qnap AI Core” to be able to use face and object recognition for your managed photos.

If you’ve already saved photos on your Windows desktop or backed them up from your previous cloud provider, you can transfer them to the NAS folder provided for this purpose.

Note: For photos in HEIC format (usually from iPhones), you should use the “Synology Image Assistant” tool to transfer the photos from your PC. Qnap, on the other hand, requires an additional paid NAS app called “CAYIN” in order to manage and display iPhone photos or videos. Ugreen and Terramaster (starting from operating system TOS 6 and later) have no problems with iPhone formats.

The photo management on your NAS first creates thumbnails of new photos and then runs the AI engine over the images so it can later recognize faces and sometimes objects. This process can take a long time if you have a large number of photos.

Transfer photos from phone to NAS

To back up your photos from your smartphone directly to the NAS, install the NAS manufacturer’s photo app on your phone.

Make sure you’re on your home network’s Wi-Fi with your phone before you start the photo app for the first time. Then, log into your NAS via the app and follow the setup wizard. This usually offers you the option of either transferring all photos already stored on your phone to the NAS, or to save only photos you’ll be taking from now on.

You can also specify whether the phone photos now saved on the NAS should be deleted from your phone’s storage, allowing you to free up storage space on the phone. You’ll also want to specify whether photos should only transfer to the NAS over Wi-Fi and not mobile data.

Note: To be able to access your NAS photos from outside your home network, you must log into the phone app with your NAS remote access account. You’ll see a corresponding message in the app during setup.

Furthermore, remote access to your NAS photo management depends not only on the connection of your mobile phone but also on the connection of your home internet service via which the photos are transferred from NAS to smartphone. When performing remote actions, don’t expect your NAS to offer the same speed and performance as you’d get with Google, Amazon, or Microsoft cloud storage.

Further reading: The best NAS drives worth getting