Many people try cloud storage and local storage as interchangeable. There are two different ways to save files, one of which comes with a monthly bill and the other requires effort to set up and maintain. That way of thinking quickly falls apart the first time you use a NAS as your primary work environment. No one realizes how slow cloud storage is until they have a modern NAS to compare it to. Once you experience them side by side in your daily workflow, these two storage methods will not be similar at all.
My setup is an older desktop running TrueNAS with a RAIDZ2 cluster on six hard driveswhich gives me about 16TB of usable space, protected against dual disk failures. It is connected via Gigabit Ethernet and sends files to my network via SMB. Pretty simple setup. I obviously knew that if I built a NAS, it would be faster than accessing files from cloud storage, but I had underestimated how much it would transform my daily experience. Even simple things like opening a directory, saving a file, or batch exporting have visible latency when traveling back and forth to a remote data center, but operations are instantaneous on my NAS.
What local storage provides
Much speed and much less waiting
There is a difference between local and cloud when it comes to any type of file operation, but the gap becomes more pronounced with large files. I shoot a lot of 4K video, and before the NAS, I saved new footage to a cloud-synced folder that uploaded its contents to an S3 bucket. It worked, technically, but it was painfully slow. Placing a 30GB video folder on the NAS over my local network only takes a few seconds. Uploading that same folder to the cloud depends on my ISP’s speed, the provider’s ingest rate, and any throttling that’s happening behind the scenes. Needless to say, the speed difference is night and day. Meanwhile, my editor is trying to preview files that haven’t been fully synced from the cloud yet, which introduces a bottleneck into my workflow.
Throughout the day, all the subtle delays accumulate as well. I’m talking about operations with smaller files, like opening a folder with a few hundred files and waiting for file explorer to finish filling with data. Open that same folder in a The participation of local SMEs is instantaneous. All of these little delays occur when your tools interact with cloud storage, because it’s a round trip just to retrieve metadata, check file states, or commit writes. In addition to enjoying the speed of local storage, I no longer need to deal with sync errors. With the cloud, it’s not uncommon to encounter conflict warnings, file version discrepancies, and large syncs failing silently. These problems disappear with a NAS.
But what about accessing files from anywhere?
The cloud continues to gain in convenience
It’s true that cloud storage is more accessible than your local NAS. It is accessible from anywhere by default and there is almost always an application on each type of system from which you want to access your files. You also don’t need to do much setup beyond logging in and uploading or downloading files. The cloud service does the rest. With that level of convenience, it’s understandable why some people would be content to deal with the disadvantage of latency and save their data in the cloud. A NAS requires a lot of setup to achieve the same level of accessibility and convenience, and even then, you need to maintain the device or your files will become unavailable when something goes wrong.
The “from anywhere” pitch is compelling, but how often do you need to access your files from somewhere other than your home? If the answer is almost never, then the benefits of a NAS probably outweigh the convenience that cloud storage offers. Additionally, remote access can absolutely be implemented on your NAS. My solution was a WireGuard VPN tunnel back to my home network. It was a unique setup and makes my NAS accessible from anywhere. It’s definitely more setup than a simple cloud client requires, but the small time investment was worth it for me.
Moving all my work files to a NAS also made me realize how much the cloud blurs the line between work storage and backup storage. A synced Dropbox folder is not really a backup, as unwanted file changes are propagated to the service automatically. A true backup has version control and separation from the primary copy. Some cloud services provide this, but my backups feel more secure now that I’ve moved to an in-house solution. My most important files are backed up with rsync to a second local machine and once again to a rented VPS. The 3-2-1 rule It’s something that cloud sync tools generally don’t push you to do, which makes it very easy to confuse a synced folder with an actual backup. At the end of the day, I don’t trust cloud providers to implement foolproof backup for me.
The cloud has its uses, but it is not for functional storage
After working in an on-premises environment, I can no longer tolerate the latency of cloud storage. The cloud works well for sharing irrelevant data, accessing it from anywhere, and collaborating with others. But anything important I’m actively working on stays on my local network, where latency doesn’t impact my workflow.
