If you're a tech enthusiast like me, chances are you have an old phone or two lying around unused. While it's not necessarily the best use for it, you can definitely take one of those older devices and use it as a rudimentary NAS for sharing data across all your devices. I recently undertook the very basic project of hosting a media server on an old Android smartphone, and it's really easy for you to do as well.

On top of that, if you really want to take things a step further, you can root an old Android phone and set up Docker on it. From there, you can host normal applications that you would on any other NAS and deploy them on your network, including running things like Pi-hole or Jellyfin. We're making just a NAS out of an Android phone, but you can easily host a Nextcloud Pi server on your smartphone if it's rooted.

MiXplorer can let you host different servers on an Android phone

You just need to keep it plugged in

If you want a way to easily transfer files between devices, you can use a program like MiXplorer to host a WebDav server or even an SMB share on your Android smartphone. You can then configure the level of access that you give the user logging in, and in my case, I limited the access to a single folder on my phone's storage.

This can also serve as a pretty decent backup system, and if you port forward the device you're connecting to, you can even allow it access to the wider internet so that you can access your files on the go. While I wouldn't recommend it for security reasons (like seriously, just use Tailscale or WireGuard instead of port forwarding), the point is that it's a fairly robust method that can actually give you pretty decent results in a pinch for quick backups of unimportant data.

If you host an SMB server, you'll be able to access it from native clients on both Windows and Mac through your file explorer, which makes it extra convenient. You can enable a Start on boot option in MiXplorer to make sure it starts when your phone does and always stays running too, and with an SMB server in particular, you can easily batch copy and move around files as you need them. With WebDav it's fairly basic, but the plus side is that there's no configuration involved. You may run into problems with SMB depending on your network conditions and your smartphone, so you'll need to play around with settings to get it working.

If you want something more advanced, the best way to turn your phone into a full-fledged NAS would be to root your phone and use Docker to deploy containers that contain services like Nextcloud. There are a lot of options you can try out, but the problem is that Android by default limits the virtualization of software and also prevents applications from running on ports below 1024. Given that SMB's default port is 450, this also poses a problem for SMB, and why you may notice that you'll need to manually define a port if you're connecting to your phone's SMB server remotely. Root access can get around that restriction, but if your phone is rooted, there are better options than this.

For now, though, this manages to do the job as a basic intermediary between devices, especially given that using my full NAS feels a bit overkill for such a trivial thing. A basic device that can move files between my other devices is all I needed and that's why I undertook this project. You can even plug a USB-C OTG device into your phone and host access to it via MiXplorer, which definitely leans more in the direction of a conventional NAS.

This project was, overall, very simple, but I'm looking forward to expanding on it and turning a phone (or even multiple phones) into a full-fledged NAS that can, maybe, even replace my NAS at some point! Give it a try and see what you think, because maybe it's all you need. Should this replace an actual NAS? Definitely not, but playing around with technology and finding new things to do with it is a ton of fun regardless.