Cloud services like Google Drive and iCloud are fantastic – they let me access my most important files from any device, anywhere – but the free storage is never enough.
Google offers 15GB while Apple offers an even more paltry 5GB of storage – but even the biggest ‘free’ tier isn’t enough for the vast majority of users with thousands of photos and videos, countless files and more to keep safe.
So what do you do? You start paying, of course. It starts off cheap with the lowest tier paid option – £1.59/$1.99 for 100GB, in the case of Google’s cloud storage – and that’s enough to tide you over. For a while, anyway.
As sure as day follows night, over time, you’ll begin to fill all that storage space back up – even if you delete files you no longer need. Slowly, all those holiday snaps, videos of nights out, and even work documents, all add up.
And with both Google and Apple, it also includes storage linked to associated services like Gmail or iCloud, so any large files you receive in your inbox further add to your quota.
Again, you have no choice but to upgrade to the next tier of storage, which for Google, is 200GB for £2.49/$2.99 per month. That’s not bad, but go above that limit and you’ll face a massive jump not only in storage but also in monthly cost, at a whopping £7.99/$9.99 per month for 2TB.
Like our growing storage needs, it adds up over time. That’s just under £96/$120 per year if you pay for the 2TB option monthly, just to store your files.
And so on, and so on. It’s a never-ending loop of filling up storage and paying for more. It’s either that or say goodbye to years of precious memories.
Pay up, or lose access
The worst part about Google and Apple’s monopoly on the cloud storage market is that they don’t just handle storage – they’re central to the digital experience for many of us. Google, for example, handles not just Drive but Gmail, Docs, Sheets and more, while Apple similarly handles iCloud email, iMessage and the like.
That may not sound like a big problem – one subscription covers multiple apps, after all – but it is once you start running out of storage.
No matter whether you’re in camp Apple or Google, if you run out of storage or miss a monthly payment, you don’t just lose the ability to upload new files to your cloud storage – it also locks you out of other services.
That means no access to Gmail or iMessage if you don’t pay up, and those are pretty central to the online experience for many.
That’s too much power for my liking – but what was I supposed to do? I have over 30,000 photos and 5,000 videos tied to my Google Drive account, as well as thousands of emails linked to my Gmail over the years. The answer was simple in the end; get a NAS drive.
UGreen’s latest NAS is the perfect remedy
NAS drives were all the rage in computing before the days of cloud storage, offering oodles of local storage accessible via your home network. But despite a lull in interest over the past few years, the hardware is more capable than ever.
That’s certainly the case with the UGreen NASync DH4300 Plus, which was released at the tail-end of 2025.
The bigger brother to the DH2300, the DH4300 Plus is a four-bay SATA NAS drive that supports up to 120TB of storage – 30TB per drive – for frankly massive amounts of storage. It’s powered by an 8-core processor and sports 8GB of RAM to keep things running smoothly, and its 2.5GbE LAN port boasts transfer speeds of up to 312.5MB/s depending on your home setup. Safe to say, it’s a bit of a beast.
But despite its intimidating spec sheet, it was an absolute breeze to set up; all I had to do was insert the HDDs, plug it into my router via the provided high-speed Ethernet cable and power it on. From there, everything else was handled via the UGreen NAS companion app, and setup took no more than a couple of minutes – a far cry from the early days of NAS drive networking setup.
That’s when I could start, what I affectionately called Operation Get Away From Google Drive As Soon As Possible, or OGAFGDASAP. Catchy, I know.
Getting out from Google’s clutches
This part was surprisingly easy; thanks to EU rules (gotta love the Europeans), cloud storage providers like Google and Apple have to make it easy to either download all your data or transfer it to another (ideally cheaper) service.
For me, that meant going to Google Takeout, selecting the data I wanted to download – my Google Photos library and my Drive contents – and requesting a download link. Once I had the link, I downloaded the (frankly massive) nearly 300GB of data on my PC, and extracted the ZIP files to my NAS drive via my home network.
But why stop at Google? I also pay for iCloud storage for when I’m testing the best iPhones, and that isn’t all that often, so I repeated the process, this time with iCloud.
Now, that did introduce a few issues – the biggest being duplicate photos where the images were backed up on both Apple and Google cloud servers – but UGreen likely anticipated this issue. There’s baked-in AI accessible via the companion app on both PC and mobile that lets you easily identify and delete duplicate photos. It cleared nearly 10,000 duplicate images for me in the space of a few minutes.
Now, all I have to do is open the UGreen companion app on my phone, and all my photos and videos are there waiting for me, complete with features like custom folders and facial recognition we’ve come to expect from the big platforms.
And despite being linked to my home network, I can access my files from anywhere with an internet connection via UGreen’s cloud service network. It doesn’t actually store your files in the cloud; rather, it just provides cloud-based access to the drive, which means you don’t need to faff around with port forwarding as you do with more basic drives.
Not just for network storage either
Now the beauty of the UGreen NASync DH4300 Plus is that it’s not just for network storage. With a fairly powerful spec under the hood, the NAS drive can also run full apps that can massively expand what it can do.
It meant that, rather than splashing out £112 for a Home Assistant Green to get more advanced control over my smart home tech, I could install and run it directly from my NAS drive – with great results, might I add.
It’s not the only app either; there’s actually an app store accessible via the app that gives you access to a range of apps including a Google Docs, Sheets and Slides alternative called Online Office that you can access via browser from any PC, further reducing my reliance on Google’s cloud-based services.
There’s also Docker support, so depending on your level of tech knowledge, you can run other custom apps directly from the NAS.
Yes, it’s an expensive upfront cost, but it’ll save you a lot in the long run, and with the UGreen DH4300 Plus specifically, there’s much more to it than simply acting as a way to back up your photos and videos. Goodbye, Google Drive. I definitely won’t miss you.
