Synology NAS – my home cloud

Recently I purchased a Synology NAS Server DS213. This is to archive all my digital content

  • Pictures
  • Documents,
  • Videos
  • Music

into a central repository. The NAS is 

  • Accesible from all my devices, mac, iphone, ipad, xbox. Running 24×7
  • Durable/Redundancy, it has Synology raid system with 2 x 4TB of disk space.
  • Extra redundancy with  external drives taking backup of documents and pictures. 1 weekly backup, and 1 monthly backup. The monthly drive is stored in a separate place.
  • VPN server, though i have disabled it for now. This allows to VPN into home network and for example access my local machines, or watch youtube on networks that block it 😛
  • Picture and video server.
  • Git over ssh server.
  • Time Machine Backup
  • Can SSH and program in python, or optionally install java as well on the server.
  • iPhone/iPad apps to look at pictures and videos

I have put all the images and digitized all my tape home videos and put it there. My kids now enjoy watching their childhood videos on their ipads, which were sitting in drawers for about a decade.

Future Projects of the NAS

  • Digitize all the older paper pictures, and documents and store them on the NAS.  
  • Explore the Astrix server and make it a home based VOIP server.
  • Could make it a web and wiki server but am hesitant to expose it to internet.
  • Integrate home security camera system.