I think a Synology is best if they lack technical skills. The GUI is nice and integrations are easy enough to manage. Longevity-wise, I’ve have the 918+ since 2018 and it’s still going strong. Plus there are packages for things like Tailscale (easy to use VPN) you could setup for a them. That way you reduce their attack surface of exposing services externally.

If you don't want to be called there to always it support it, go for off the shelf solution. Both qnap and Synology offer the same. When i looked half a year ago, i saw Synology as being more expensive at the time so went with ts464 qnap.

Qnap do provide a roadmap of support for older devices. So you have an idea how long they will remain supported for.

Synology rules

Even as someone with tech experience using it for the last couple years as I learned what I even wanted to do with my NAS, it was awesome

Even my less tech literate wife was able to do stuff with it, just s little bit of "here's how to access the server" and boom, the GUI is that intuitive

Honestly if they are not that technical, I'd with the nearly fool proof solutions of QNAP and Synology and alike. It is very easy to maintain. I think e.g. Synology still provides updates for their 2012-2013 generation devices, hardware limitations apply whatsoever.

Surely you get less Hardware/Dollar but the software is near fool proof. I recommended such devices to two of my half technical friends and granted mutual space for encrypted off-site Backups and it just works flawlessly. If they would have me setup any self made raspberry pi like solution and anything goes wrong with their data I'd rather not stand in their line of sight.

If they're not technical and you don't feel like playing family help desk, you can't go wrong with either synology or qnap. The downside with them is the hardware is just barely powerful enough for a NAS. If they start to get into self-hosting at all -- pihole, home-assistant, minecraft servers, jellyfin, etc -- they'll quickly run into limitations.

If they're somewhat technical but not a Linux guru, I'd add Unraid (slackware based, but 100% UI-driven) to the list. I've been running it for years and it's been great. It makes running docker/VM a breeze on top of the hardware-agnostic setup of mixed drives that makes upgrading slowly over time painless.

I've had my Synology NAS for probably more than a decade. It still occasionally gets updates. I wouldn't worry about their longevity.

Offering my experience as an example: I'm a software moron (fine at building a pc, crap at using it) and TrueNas Scale was simple to install and then access on mobile, tablet and via windows PC, at least as simple network attached storage.

When I tried to use it to just jellyfin I hit a brick wall, completely unable to understand how to use the shared datasets.

But as NAS it's simple with a bookmark to manage.

ixSystems sells pre-built machines running TrueNAS. They’re a little pricier than building on from scratch of course, but they have ECC ram and have everything set up out of the box. Funds also support the development of TrueNAS. I got one earlier this year and I love it. Fussing around in the web UI requires some technical know-how, but if you get it set up for them, I expect it to run like a dream.

I think that the proprietary solutions like Synology and QNAP are less desirable due to unknown longevity of the companies and their willingness to support their products with software updates. Am I wrong?

You're not wrong, it just for the wrong reasons haha.

The software is profit-motivated and companies in general are becoming more and more hostile to their own customers and slowly cashing in any goodwill they've developed over the years.

Collecting data, injecting ads, paywalling features, it's just the inevitable future of these companies now. Even if not today, anytime in the future, and they'd have you over a barrel because you've dedicated time and invested in this ecosystem.

Not to mention the company could disappear at any time and you'd be left with no software or network support. Things would eventually break with no recourse. Ideally they would open the source code since it costs them nothing at that point but they never do.

I’m pretty technical… but I love my Synology.

It just works. Obvious choice for those that aren’t techy.

I would suggest TrueNAS, but use Core not Scale if the hardware supports it.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.

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I use FreeNAS/TrueNAS core, and I've been using it for almost a decade now.

The UI definitely has a sharp learning curve (it's not at ALL noobie friendly) but once you figure it out it's a lovely system. It's FreeBSD based and not Linux based, but to me that's largely an upside since I've liked it a lot more.

Thanks for all the suggestions and experiences!

Anything other than QNAP.