One of the best tech additions I’ve made to my home in the last couple of years is a NAS, and I know it sounds crazy to say it, but it genuinely changed my life in multiple ways. I know what you’re thinking from the title; it’s not life-changing in the sense that It saved my life, made me a better person, or cured any disease. However, the amount of convenience that a NAS has given me in my day to day life is hard to understate.

A VPN wherever I go

WireGuard is a must-have no matter what you use your NAS for

If I want to access my home internet from anywhere in the world, WireGuard VPN is the best option that I have. For when I’m abroad and need to access services in Ireland that are geo-blocked, WireGuard has me covered. From anywhere in the world, I can connect to my NAS at home and be able to browse the internet as if I were actually at home.

On top of that, WireGuard is a great way to ensure that all of my traffic is encrypted whenever I’m on a public Wi-Fi connection. While nearly all connections online are HTTPS at this stage (but DNS over TLS still isn’t necessarily commonplace), it’s the peace of mind knowing that even background tasks from applications are all being encrypted at some point using a tunnel to my NAS to do so.

For WireGuard alone, my NAS has been massively worth it. WireGuard also enables me to benefit from all of the other reasons that I love my NAS from anywhere in the world. You can get similar results with a VPN like Tailscale or a reverse proxy like Nginx, but I like WireGuard and it’s what I’m familiar with.

I can save money running my own game servers

No longer relying on providers

With my NAS, I can run Minecraft, Source engine games, and other servers for games that I love and enjoy. If you're an avid video game player who could benefit from a server in that regard, then a NAS might be worth it. You can often rent servers in those games from providers for a monthly fee, but this way you control everything about your game server, including all of the files to keep it up and running.

While game server providers offer convenience, it's a great way to learn a new skill as well. Running Minecraft servers is how I got started with Linux more than ten years ago, and I'd highly recommend it as a great entrypoint for anyone who wants to get started.

My own personal Netflix, accessible from anywhere

I have hundreds of DVDs

Over the years, my family and I have collected a treasure trove of DVDs and CDs that we’ve ripped to a hard drive for easy playback, which has paid dividends in recent years thanks to the proliferation of smart TVs and other devices. These files are easily put on any device that we own, and it’s incredibly convenient to watch them as a result.

However, there’s another benefit if you use something like Jellyfin as a media streaming player. Jellyfin is essentially a Plex replacement, where you can host your own video files and have Jellyfin transcode those video files while they’re streamed to your devices. You can expose it to the wider internet and connect remotely if you wish, but I access it through WireGuard, as it allows me to browse as if I’m actually on my home network.

Thanks to Jellyfin, I don’t need to rely on the poor offerings of some media streaming services in Ireland, and can instead use my own library that my family and I Have curated over the years. You can even create multiple users with Jellyfin that all have access to your library, so I gave my dad a WireGuard profile that he can use to stream from my NAS as well. You can even download files from it for later playback, in case you’re going somewhere without a good enough internet connection.

A Google Drive and Google Photos replacement, for peace of mind

I trust Google Drive, but having control over my data is simply better

In data storage and backups, one of the most important concepts to be aware of is redundancy. The rule of thumb is generally to have hard backups as well as cloud backups, and that’s where Nextcloud comes in. Nextcloud is a Google Drive replacement that you can run on your NAS, and you can sync to Nextcloud just like you would Google Drive.

Paired with Nextcloud, you can also host a Google Photos replacement called PhotoPrism. There are other programs like XXX that others have recommended, so take a look at some of those options and see if they’re better suited to you. With PhotoPrism and Nextcloud, I can host as much data as my storage allows, and again with WireGuard, I can backup my photos and videos securely from anywhere in the world.

At the time of writing, I have 10GB of photos backed up to my Nextcloud instance. With Google Photos, nowadays, you only get 15GB of free storage that’s shared with your Drive, Gmail, and other storage. It’s a bit of a no-brainer to take the plunge when you look at it like that.

A smart home hub

Home Assistant lets you control everything in your home from one centralized place

When I went away for a weekend a few months ago, I set up a couple of webcams in my home streaming to my NAS over IPTV. From there, I used Home Assistant to collect those streams and broadcast them back out to myself, meaning that I could keep watch over my home while I was away. That’s the power of Home Assistant.

It doesn’t just do that, though; it integrates with Alexa, Google Assistant, and other smart home services so that you can control your entire home from just one place. There are apps for basically every platform that are officially supported by Home Assistant, and it’s a centralized, open-source way to keep control of your home.

The reason why I find this life-changing is the peace of mind it can give me when I’m traveling. I can keep an eye on things in my home and see what’s going on, and you can even configure it with some work to notify you of movement or changes in the image if you like. It’s a genuinely useful tool and all I needed to do was use some webcams I had lying around.

A NAS isn't for everyone, but if you're into tech, then you'll love it

My NAS has taught me a lot about networking, Linux, and Docker, to the point that to be honest, that in itself is yet another reason why it's changed my life. Changing a life doesn't have to be a big, grandiose thing, but it's a big deal when it changes how you interact with the devices in your home and how you work on a day-to-day basis.

If you're on the fence about a NAS, hopefully, some of these points have swayed you one way or another. I built a NAS out of some old PC components, so you don't even need to go and buy a pre-built if you don't want to!