My parents are looking into getting their own NAS to replace iCloud. I don’t really have much experience with that, and zero experience with apple stuff. They are also not very techy, but at least enthusiastic.
Can sombody recommend easy NAS products where you basically just buy a device, do some basic setup, and then it functions as your at-home cloud? I don’t want to get roped into doing too much admin for them, but they do already have DDNS for some other smart home crap. Bonus if it’s non-US tech.
Personally I run a nextcloud server on a VPS that I could expand, that’s not quite selfhosted, I don’t know if that integrates well with apple though, are they better off if I just onboard them onto that?
Cheers in advance
I use TrueNAS, which supports TimeMachine out of the box and I have set up Samba-shares to make it simple for family members to drop files in a shared folder. Some of them also have a personal folder. This works on Linux, Windows and MacOS. I also use Wireguard to make sure they always have access to the share.
TrueNAS has a learning curve, but it is reasonably well documented and if you spend some time up front, it pays of.
I use an HP EliteDesk 800 Mini with two boot disks for redundancy and several disks connected trough USB3. Using USB disks are discouraged by TrueNAS but it has worked fine for several years for my low budget setup.