NAS Advice

[Enquiries]

Hello, I'm a tech savvy home user with a long history of IT involvement dating back to the late 90s. In our home (two users), we have a handful of iOS devices and a single Windows-based laptop. I've started looking at NAS options as a way to automatically back-up photos and videos from our iOS devices instead of paying for cloud storage. I need the photos and videos be accessible from outside our home. I have no interest in other activities (e.g., use of PLEX). I need the software piece to be simple and as automatic as possible.

I have been interested in Synology, because they seem to have a simple, user-friendly software environment with good privacy measures, but have some concerns given their recent hardware locking activities. QNAP and UGREEN seem to both fall short in the areas of software and security, although I have had a couple of friends encourage me to use QNAP. Thank you!

[ed]

Thanks for the message. For your use case, which is essentially automatic photo and video backup from iOS devices with simple remote access and nothing more, Synology is still the strongest and most user friendly option. Their mobile apps, especially Synology Photos, remain the most reliable way to continuously back up iPhones without user interaction. Remote access through QuickConnect also works out of the box without any configuration and keeps things private without exposing ports.

The recent drive policy changes only apply to their new 2025 enterprise racks and a few edge cases. All current two bay and four bay DiskStation models still fully support normal third party drives, and Synology have already publicly stated that these consumer models will continue to allow third party HDDs. For your scale of storage, a DS225+ or DS425+ with two or four WD Red or Seagate IronWolf drives will be completely fine.

QNAP and UGREEN offer more raw hardware for the money, but for automated iOS photo backup and simple external access they are not as seamless. QNAP’s QuMagie and mobile sync tools work, but they are not as consistent as Synology Photos. UGREEN are improving fast but still lack the long term software maturity and privacy controls you get with DSM.

If your goal is “install, turn on, and forget about it”, Synology remains the easiest and safest choice for a home environment, and will give you exactly the workflow you want with minimal maintenance.