I replaced my NAS with Google Drive and barely noticed

I had no intention of doing this experiment, but my month-long trip away from home forced me to turn off my NAS for a few weeks. What I expected to be a temporary inconvenience ended up feeling…normal. The NAS is such an ingrained part of my local file access workflow I assumed I’d miss it right away, but with a portable SSD in my hand and Google Drive practically moving everywhere with me, I had little reason to think about my home setup.

For the most part, everything worked, although there were still a couple of moments where a local network storage solution would have been more suitable.

The biggest advantage of local network storage is speed and almost 24-hour uptime. These are infrastructure benefits: your server won’t go down even when the Internet does, and it’s necessary for mission-critical scenarios where you simply can’t afford to lose connection to your data. But beyond that, cloud storage often gains in convenience and, over time, You gravitate toward that convenience.

Google Drive, in particular, has a much more polished interface than most enterprise NAS software offers, and it also benefits from its widespread popularity. You can share a link without a second thought, knowing that the other person already uses Google Drive. That network effect alone makes it a more productive solution for daily work. It also blends into the background and does its job silently.

A NAS, on the other hand, is closer to running your own server, meaning you’re the IT administrator who has to set it up, maintain it, and troubleshoot when something goes wrong. You can’t just raise a support ticket like you do with Google Drive and move on.

To be honest, not many of my workflows were affected by living away from home.

I use my Synology NAS to sync files between devices, maintain files, and backup my systems. While I was away, Google Drive, along with a portable SSD, stepped into everything without much friction. Google Drive for desktop backed up important folders and took care of archiving tasks. Meanwhile, occasional Time Machine backups to a portable SSD replaced my automated NAS backups. The latter wasn’t as fancy as my NAS setup, but it worked well enough that I didn’t miss the NAS.

If anything, the cloud seemed more reliable. Any problem with the NAS causes the entire system to crash, while Google’s servers rarely fail, leading me to depend on it even more.

I already had the Google One AI Pro plan with 2TB of storage. which recently increased to 5TB. That gave me enough leeway to start uploading data and older project files for safekeeping, something I previously reserved for the NAS. That also gave me a reason to change from storage saver mode backup quality in Google Photos at original quality. And now I can avoid maintaining two parallel backup systems, one on Google Photos and one on the NAS, one of which wasn’t that reliable anyway.

And that’s exactly where the cracks started to appear. Mobile NAS apps are still relatively niche, and while Synology Photos and Drive felt competitive when they were new, they’ve largely stayed in the same place. There have been more cases than I can count where the Synology Photos app had not backed up months of media, while I assumed it was doing so in the background.

By contrast, Google’s ecosystem has moved forward with better design, tighter integrations, and a host of AI features to top it all off. In practical, everyday use, Google’s cloud stack seems more reliable than my Synology DS920+, not just because of uptime, but because the entire experience is designed to reduce friction rather than requiring maintenance.

I still consider network storage devices to be more fundamental than the software layer that is cloud storage, and that is precisely why they cannot be replaced as easily, at least not completely.

The fact that your NAS is constantly available on the network means you can automate many tasks, with the computer and NAS talking in the background and running everything without intervention (desktop NAS tools tend to be more reliable). My weekly backup routine is an example where I don’t need to touch anything and things run like clockwork. Whereas right now, I have to periodically remember to plug in the SSD for Time Machine backups to run. As I wrote this, I realized I hadn’t done a backup in over a week, which highlights the difference.

On top of that, I can’t host my media locally during Plex Streaming without my NAS, which is a pain. While I can live with online streaming services, sometimes I like to watch my own collection. My home security camera also downloads images to the NAS for long-term storage, which equates to hundreds of gigabytes of data that would be impractical to manage on portable drives. And this is exactly the type of workload where a NAS feels purpose-built, offering local speed and effectively infinite storage.

And without forgetting the elephant in the room, the biggest advantage of local storage is that it is local. You don’t have to rely on the Internet or available bandwidth to transfer your data, and it is available instantly and capable of transferring tens of gigabytes per minute without overloading the network. It doesn’t happen often, but when I don’t have Internet, I wish I had the NAS with me.

My NAS usage came in waves for the first few days. I was excited to have one set up and wanted to run everything on it, trying to completely eliminate cloud subscriptions. It was fun to host my data on my own server, but I soon realized that I was modifying my workflow to justify the NAS, often choosing it even when a cloud service was more convenient.

Finally, I decided to prioritize my workflow over everything else. If a cloud-based tool worked better, I’d use it instead of forcing myself to use the NAS, which is why I never hosted my notes app on it. Google Keep is faster and, more importantly, can be accessed from anywhere.

This hybrid system meant I wasn’t completely reliant on a single configuration and already had workflows that could avoid either. If Google Drive didn’t work, I would have the NAS, and now that I don’t have the NAS, I’ve moved to the cloud without friction. That flexibility is liberating because it helps me focus on real work instead of constantly modifying the infrastructure, which is exactly what I did with the NAS every time something went wrong.

So the question is whether I will replace the NAS completely.

The answer is no. I’ll stick with the hybrid system that works for me. However, the balance will now shift slightly. I’ll lean more toward cloud storage for everyday tasks, while the NAS will serve more as infrastructure for critical workloads like backups and camera recordings. The NAS is being downgraded in my setup and will not affect my workflow in the slightest.