Greetings! I’ve been daily driving a Raspberry Pi 4B as a home server for quite a while now and thought it was a great time to make the switch to a proper NAS.
My current Home Server setup uses 2 Raspberry Pi’s. One is where i selfhost all of the stuff i need, and one hosts my website.
The Pi only has 4gb of RAM, which is ok for me. But i can’t really say much about it’s performance. In Jellyfin, it’s struggling with streaming music. Not even a movie, a single MP3 file, it struggles with it.
I tried solutions like Nextcloud for a Selfhosted Cloud Storage Solution, but it would always wipe out it’s config every time the pi reboots.
I am looking forward to buy a Synology NAS. Their Web interface seems intuitive (theres even docker support too) and easy to use. However, i really am concerned on what data can Synology collect off of it.
So, what data can Synology collect off the NAS and is it safe in a Privacy nerd’s view?
I’ve been a synology user and fan for over 15 years now. Both personally and at work. They used to be powerful-for-the-price, efficient devices with good software. Photos, drive, media server, file storage, a docker containers were the big use cases. They were easy to set up securely for remote connections, and I’ve never seen one fail.
Nowadays though, I’d recommend something else. They have started on the enshittification journey. They removed hardware decoding features, they force you into their hard drives now, the hardware is overpriced, and other diy systems have caught up wrt features and ease of setup. Synology isn’t bad today, it’s just not the only game in town anymore. You can get more for less money with the same amount of effort.
WRT to data collection-I don’t think they collect anything now. But I’m not sure I trust them anymore. It probably won’t stay that way.
Synology has walked back their HDD decision (for now…), but as a DS224+ owner I actually just bought a new system, because I find the Synology software ecosystem to be kind of clunky and limiting.