After exporting my photos for migration to Synology, Google gave me 95 2GB zip files to download. I tried downloading directly into my mapped network drive, but the speed was super slow. My tip for you is if you are familiar with docker, you can spin up a Firefox container and map your desired network drive to the container. If you download from the Docker container, it will use the NAS’s wired internet connection rather than your PC’s WiFi connection. It is a much faster process, cutting it from days to hours for me. I’m sure most of you would have thought of this right away, but after 25 manual downloads, this was a huge relief for me.
It’s not a cheap hobby, but self hosting is fun. Learning more about Docker has made it a great way to learn self hosting. I guess Synology is like training wheels in the self hosting community, but when you only know Windows, it’s a good introduction to Linux, servers, networking, RAID, and a ton of other topics.
The units aren’t expensive when you compare it to the storage drives. I use a DS918+ which has 4 bays, and I have 14TB drives in each one. This is much more space than I need, but you always end up with more than you expect. I’d say each drive is probably $250 each right now.
I’m a software engineer working with cloud hosting by profession, so I really dont mind training wheels for my home needs. In fact it is preferred because I want to spend the smallest amount of time possible just solving my problem (easily sharing photos between ios and Android without relying icloud or google). I do enough hard stuff at work haha.
14TB is perfect. I could probably get away with a four bay setup with a RAID config for redundancy.