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!
This answer is very different depending upon your life circumstances.
A single person with fixed income, is different than a two income household with children. I’m not saying they can’t both reach the same conclusion, just at their circumstances justify different choices being valid.
There’s also your technical proficiency, and pain tolerance for saving money.
For example, you could eliminate all external services, self-host everything, and then configure an S3 object storage provider for critical cold storage backups. That might also require you spending a bit more upfront to expand your NAS storage capacity.
While that may save you a bunch of money in the long term, it will definitely cost you a lot of time and effort.
What’s convenient for you? What can you not afford to lose access to? What’s your budget? How much time do you have to manage different solutions?
Those aren’t questions for you to provide me answers for, just some of the considerations that will impact different people’s answer to this question.
I’m skilled with IT stuff (I guess many are on here) but have plenty of that at work and a highly varying degree of time for such things based on what’s happening in life. I guess the more handheld something is the more I fear it might break when I absolutely don’t have time or mental capacity to deal with it. I’m getting quite comfy with how well the Synology works. It’s kind of weird there isn’t a “pay up and just extend the synology into the cloud automagically” - it all sounds adding more possible failure sources.
I suggest enlarging your current NAS or building one and running something like Open Media Vault, Umbrel, CASA, etc.
For streaming, Kodi is the best value though it’s via pirating. But is pirating such a bad thing when these companies steal your data and revoke movies that you purchased? With a debrid service costing $17 for 6mo you can stream basically anything with no slowdowns. Run Kodi via LibreElec on a RPi5.
Actually have Jellyfin running on the NAS and am starting to get back into “in-home streaming” - but I also want to maybe stream a show while traveling.
You can put Kodi on a tablet and stream on the go. Just be sure to pick a lower quality file or some movies can be like 70gb
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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.
Check out netbird and tailscale if you want secure remote access
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.
Look into Plex. They are spinning their photos and music streaming into separate apps from video. PlexAMP is already out. You just have to set up a NAS or sever with port forwarding on your home network. I use an old spare PC as my server and it works great.
You can get everything under one brand with google.
Drive Photos Yt Music Yt tv
It’s designed to be device agnostic.
You can also do most of this with your Synology
Do they have any bundle offers like Apple One? It really adds up quickly. I’m honestly hoping for some Black Friday deals that reduce the cost for whatever I end up choosing.
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You probably just need Google One and Youtube Premium, which includes Youtube Music Premium.
Of course, if you don’t care about YouTube Premium, you could instead get a family subscription to a different music streaming service - Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music are all leagues better than Youtube Music, in my opinion.
I don’t personally recommend Google for anything, to be clear.
