# Network Attached Storage (NAS) A NAS is a small dedicated computer full of hard drives, plugged into your network, whose one job is storing and serving files. Every device in the house (or company) sees the same shared folders over standard protocols like SMB or NFS. Instead of files scattered across laptops, external disks, and cloud accounts, there's ONE central place that's always on. Why it matters: - **Centralization** — one source of truth for documents, photos, videos, and archives. The digital equivalent of "everything needs a place". - **Redundancy** — multiple drives in RAID keep your data available when a disk dies (and disks always die eventually). Careful though: RAID protects against drive failure, NOT against deletion, ransomware, or fire. A NAS is a backup TARGET, but it still needs its own off-site backup. - **Privacy and control** — your data on your hardware, not on someone else's computer. No subscription, no vendor reading your files, no account lockout risk. - **A platform** — modern NAS systems also run apps and containers via [[Docker]], which makes them the natural home base for [[Self-hosting]]: media servers, sync services like [[Syncthing]], photo libraries, home automation, and more. Consumer NAS vendors (Synology, QNAP, UGREEN, ...) sell turnkey boxes; the DIY crowd builds their own with TrueNAS or Unraid. I use a [[Synology NAS]] myself. ## References - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-attached_storage ## Related - [[Synology NAS]] - [[Self-hosting]] - [[Docker]] - [[Syncthing]]