Over the long term, I don’t
trust a NAS in my house to hold my photo collection (online.) Not because of the NAS, but because of my house.
Living spaces have a lot of factors that people optimize for when picking them. Data centres only have a few, and one of the most important is “is not prone to natural disasters.” Another is “has clean power with well-implemented surge and lightning-strike protection, and likely a UPS for graceful shutdown on power-cut.” I did not weigh any of those factors heavily when selecting where to live. A 1000-year flood could put my house underwater.
And while you could certainly stick a drive or tape with your photo collection in a fire safe in your home — that’s not really the point, here. Online sync and thin-client access is.
> They can still access it
Data stored in these services can be stored E2E-encrypted with only your clients, not the backends, holding the keys. IIRC there are many apps designed exactly for this “store data across many low-trust remote clouds, never giving the cloud providers the keys” use-cases.
On the other hand, IIRC there are no apps shipped by the NAS hardware vendors that do this, because they assume that your own physical ownership of the NAS is enough for you. And while you can set your NAS up to act similarly to a PC, with an encrypted disk that’s mounted on boot — that’s pretty useless, since a NAS is only serving a useful purpose when it’s already up when you need it, so its uptime will inevitably be measured in months.
Which is problematic, when your modelled attacker isn’t “the cloud vendor snooping on you”, but “the government raiding your house.” Data E2E-encrypted at rest in the cloud, with the only keys being on a device in your pocket can quickly locally wipe, is much more secure against that threat. (Not that this is the most likely threat for most people, but I like considering it, because if you can solve for this, you end up solving for basically all other threat models “for free.”)