I replaced my NAS with Google Drive for a month and barely noticed

I didn’t intend to do this experiment, but my month-long trip away from home forced me to shut down my NAS for a good 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 that I assumed I’d miss it immediately, 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 at all.

For the most part, everything just 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 near round-the-clock uptime. These are infrastructural 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 wins on convenience, and over time, you gravitate towards that convenience.

Google Drive, in particular, has a much more polished interface than what most enterprise-y NAS software offers, and it also benefits from its sheer spread. You can share a link without a second thought, knowing the other person already uses Google Drive. That network effect alone makes it a more productive solution for day-to-day work. It also blends into the background, quietly doing its job.

A NAS, on the other hand, is closer to running your own server, which means you are the IT manager who has to set it up, maintain it, and troubleshoot it when something breaks. You can’t simply raise a support ticket as you do with Google Drive and move on.

To be honest, not a lot of my workflows were affected by living away from my house.

I use my Synology NAS to sync files across devices, maintain archives, and back up my systems. While I was away, Google Drive, along with a portable SSD, stepped in for all of it without much friction. Google Drive for desktop backed up important folders and took over archival duties. Meanwhile, occasional Time Machine backups to a portable SSD replaced my automated NAS backups. The latter wasn’t as elegant as my NAS setup, but it worked well enough that I didn’t find myself missing the NAS.

If anything, the cloud felt more dependable. Any issue with the NAS brings the entire system down, whereas Google’s servers rarely go down, prompting me to depend on it even more.

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

And that’s exactly where the cracks started to show. NAS apps for mobile 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 instances than I can count where the Synology Photos app hadn’t backed up months of media, while I assumed it did in the background.

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

I still find network storage devices to be more foundational than the software layer that cloud storage is, which is precisely why they can’t be replaced as easily, at least not completely.

Your NAS being constantly available on the network means you can automate a lot of tasks, with the computer and NAS talking in the background and executing everything without intervention (NAS tools for desktop tend to be more reliable). My weekly backup routine is one 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. Writing this, I realized I haven’t taken a backup in over a week, which itself highlights the difference.

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

And not to forget the elephant in the room, the biggest advantage of local storage is that it’s local. You don’t have to rely on the internet or available bandwidth to move your data, and it’s available instantly, capable of transferring tens of gigabytes every minute without straining the network. It doesn’t happen often, but when my internet is down, I do wish I had the NAS with me.

My NAS usage came in waves during the early days. I was excited to have set one up and wanted to run everything on it, trying to weed out cloud subscriptions entirely. It was a fun run of hosting my data on my own server, but soon I realized I was bending my workflow to justify the NAS, often choosing it even when a cloud service was more convenient.

Eventually, I decided to prioritize my workflow over everything else. If a cloud-based tool worked better, I would use it instead of forcing myself to stick to the NAS, which is why I never hosted my notes app on it. Google Keep is faster, and more importantly, it’s accessible anywhere.

This hybrid system meant I wasn’t entirely dependent on a single setup, and I already had workflows in place that could bypass either one. If Google Drive wasn’t working, 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 freeing because it helps me focus on actual work rather than constantly tinkering with infrastructure, which is exactly what I found myself doing with the NAS whenever something went wrong.

So, the question is whether I’ll replace the NAS completely.

The answer is no. I’ll stick to the hybrid system that works for me. However, the balance will now shift slightly. I’ll lean more toward cloud storage for day-to-day tasks, while the NAS will function more as infrastructure for fundamental workloads like backups and camera footage. The NAS is getting a demotion in my setup, and it’s not going to affect my workflow one bit.