My cloud, my rules
Overview
Once I started taking more photos with a camera, I realized it wouldn't scale to keep every RAW file on my computer. Worse: on my phone. I needed a way to store everything safely, and still open a photo whenever I wanted to look at it or edit it.
I looked at a few cloud options. They were all pretty expensive, and I wasn't willing to spend that much on monthly fees.
Details
At work I found a Slack channel called #photography. It's basically where other people share tips, post events, buy and sell gear, and plan meetups. So I asked how each of them dealt with this storage problem.
To my surprise, a lot of people replied. I found out many of them had built their own private cloud, a NAS. Some used Synology. Others went 100% homemade, buying part by part and installing open-source systems made for this, like TrueNAS.
I did some research and went with a UGREEN DX4800. It has four bays, and for now mine has two Seagate IronWolf Pro 4TB drives.
I set it up in RAID 1, so one disk is an exact copy of the other. If one dies or starts failing, I still have a backup and I don't lose the photos I care about. The other side of it is that even though I have 8TB of disks, in practice I only get 4TB because of this setup.
I hope prices drop so I can buy two more drives, and then I'll rethink which RAID I want to use.
I'm really enjoying the UGREEN system. The mobile app is great, and the sharing options are excellent too. I don't struggle to send photos to other people anymore. I recommend it a lot.
If you're running out of storage and don't want to pay those expensive cloud fees every month, go for it. Build your NAS.