Hello! I would like to take some distance from Google because I don’t like its hegemony over the internet. I’ve switched from chrome to Firefox, I’ve stopped using it as a search engine and I’ve started using duckduckgo for starters, but I’m a bit more lost on how to replace its other services. What are yours alternatives to Google? I’ve heard about proton mail to replacement Gmail, how is it? Do you know something to replace maps and drive?
Before today I never heard about NAS, they are fascinating! Having your own server seems like an amazing idea. Do you have any resources to suggest on the topic? I’m unfortunately not extremely tech savvy, but I can probably manage. Can you create a NAS with any modem or is the fritzbox particularly good for this job?
I’ve made a comment about NASs a while ago explaining mostly the important parts of it (https://lemmy.ca/comment/1524030), but to answer your questions :
I would not recommend using a router/modem as your nas server because there are better ways to do this. Simplest way would be to get a small computer (like a raspberry pi, thinkcenter, etc) and attack external harddrives. Then, next step would be to choose how you want to share and use the storage; I mostly recommend NextCloud for beginners/intermediates, super easy to setup and start using out of the box.
For you I would recommend following my comment. Once you’re comfortable with wanting to make your own NAS, then I would recommend you to look into hardware and start planning out a build. If it is too expensive, look towards small, mini computers like rpi, thinkcenter, librecomputer, etc. and then slowly expand from there.
Yes, making a NAS is expensive at the start, if you do decide to make one with all brand new gear, but it is worth it for your privacy imo. The trip is long, sometimes annoying as fuck, but the end-result is infinitely better.
If you have questions let me know!
Thanks for the detailed reply! I’ll probably look into building a Nas with a raspberry pi then, sounds doable. I’m sure it’s more annoying than using a cloud service in the beginning, but I agree that is absolutely better. A quote always stuck with me: “a cloud service is simply another guy’s computer” and I would rather struggle a bit in the beginning rather than giving my personal photos/files to a stranger. Plus, I can probably make my NAS as big as I want.
while this is certainly true that a dedicated server would be the better option, using my fritzbox with a SATA USB drive attached to it as a NAS server has been the cheapest way for me to realise it :)
My fritzbox (7362 SL, pretty old at this point) has a NAS support for a drive you can attach to it via USB. And you can enable the fritzbox to accept external connections to your NAS. And meanwhile you can use the attached storage via FTP from inside your network.
NAS is the way to go. Raspi is a decent place to start but if you want something with more power, say you want to run a plex server for instance, buying an old optiplex off ebay is a great way to start. If you want to learn Linux/Docker slap ubuntu server on it and if you dont, use truenas SCALE. The PI will “make” you learn linux and docker as well.