I replaced the NAS with Google Drive and barely noticed

I didn’t intend to do this experiment, but my month-long trip away from home forced me to shut down my NAS for a few weeks. What I expected to be a temporary discomfort felt normal. NAS does local file access is such an ingrained part of my workflow I assumed I’d miss it right away, but with a portable SSD in hand and Google Drive moving with me almost everywhere, I’ve had little reason to think about my home setup at all.

While there were a few points where a local network storage solution would have been more appropriate, for the most part it just worked.

The biggest advantage of local network storage is speed and round-the-clock uptime. These are infrastructure advantages: your server won’t go down even if the internet is working, and it’s only necessary for critical scenarios where you can’t afford to lose connection to your data. But beyond that, cloud storage often gains convenience, and over time, you tend to this comfort.

Google Drive in particular has a more polished interface than most enterprise NAS software offers, and it also benefits from its transparent distribution. You can share a link knowing that the other person is already using Google Drive. This network effect alone makes it a more productive solution for everyday work. He also blends into the background, quietly doing his job.

On the other hand, a NAS is closer to managing your own server, meaning you’re the IT manager who has to set it up, maintain it, and troubleshoot when something goes wrong. You can’t just raise a support ticket and move on, like with Google Drive.

To be honest, living away from home hasn’t affected much of my workflow.

I use my Synology NAS to sync files between devices, store archives, and back up my systems. While I was away, Google Drive, along with a portable SSD, went into it all without too much friction. Google Drive for desktop backed up important folders and took over archival duties. In the meantime, periodic Time Machine backups to a portable SSD have replaced my automated NAS backups. The latter wasn’t as elegant as my NAS setup, but it worked well enough that I didn’t miss the NAS.

If anything, the cloud felt more secure. Any problem with the NAS brings the whole system down, whereas Google’s servers rarely go down, which makes me depend on it more.

I was already on the Google One AI Pro plan with 2TB of storage, recently increased to 5 TB. This gave me enough free space to start uploading old project files and data to protect, something I previously saved for my NAS. This gave me a reason to switch Backup quality from memory saving mode Original quality in Google Photos. Now I can avoid maintaining two parallel backup systems – one on Google Photos and one on NAS – one of which wasn’t very reliable anyway.

And it was here that the cracks began to show. NAS apps for mobile are still relatively niche, and while Synology Photos and Drive were competitive when they were new, they’ve largely stayed the same. There have been more cases than I can count where the Synology Photos app has failed to back up media over the months, assuming it was in the background.

In contrast, Google’s ecosystem has been pushed forward with better design, tighter integrations, and plenty of AI features to top it all off. In practical, day-to-day use, Google’s cloud stack feels more reliable than my Synology DS920+, not just because of uptime, but because the whole experience is designed to reduce friction rather than requiring maintenance.

I still consider network storage devices more fundamental than the software layer of cloud storage, which is precisely why they can’t be replaced easily, at least not completely.

Having a NAS always available on the network means you can automate a lot of tasks with the computer and NAS talking in the background and doing things without intervention (desktop NAS tools are more reliable). My weekly backup routine is an example where I don’t need to touch anything and everything works like clockwork. Right now, I have to remember to plug in the SSD from time to time for Time Machine backups to run. As I write this, I realize I haven’t backed up in over a week, which highlights the difference.

Also, I can’t host my media locally Plex streaming without my NAS. While I can live with online streaming services, sometimes I like to browse my own collection. My home security camera also uploads footage to a NAS for long-term storage, which amounts to hundreds of gigabytes of data that would be impossible to manage on portable drives. And that’s the kind of workload a NAS feels purpose-built for, offering native speed and effectively unlimited storage.

And let’s not forget the elephant in the room, the biggest advantage of local storage is that it’s local. You don’t have to rely on the internet or available bandwidth to transfer your data, and it’s available instantly, capable of transferring tens of gigabytes every minute without straining the network. It doesn’t happen often, but I wish I had my NAS with me when my internet goes down.

My NAS usage came in waves in the early days. I was excited to build one and wanted to run everything on it eliminate cloud subscriptions entirely. Hosting my data on my own server was a fun thing to do, but I soon found myself bending my workflow to justify the NAS, even choosing cloud service when it was more convenient.

Ultimately, I decided to prioritize my workflow. If a cloud-based tool worked better, I’d use it instead of forcing myself to stick to a NAS, which is why I’ve never hosted my recording software on it. Google Keep is faster and more importantly, it’s available anywhere.

This hybrid system meant that I wasn’t completely dependent on a single setup, and I already had workflows that could bypass both. I would have a NAS if Google Drive didn’t work, and now that I don’t have a NAS, I’ve moved to the cloud out of friction. This flexibility is liberating because it helps me focus on the actual work rather than constantly dealing with the infrastructure, which is what happens when something goes wrong with the NAS.

So the question is, will I replace the NAS entirely?

The answer is no. I’ll stick with the hybrid system that works for me. However, the balance will now shift slightly. I’ll lean more toward cloud storage for day-to-day tasks, while the NAS will function more as infrastructure for core workloads like backups and camera footage. The NAS is down in my setup and it won’t affect my workflow one bit.