I have a Dell R710 with about 20TB of combined storage across a couple volumes I present via SMB/Windows Server. Its been … ok as I don’t use a AD Domain at home, but slow and the R710 has randomly rebooted every day or two for years now. I autoboot some VM’s, but I don’t let anything critical to my home networking or work stuff live on it (the “NAS” VM is the closest thing to a priority workload). I have another windows 10VM that tries to do old school icloud photo sync, but its pretty poor. So I’m looking to replace it, or at least the storage aspect.

My biggest goals are:

  1. photo syncing, I’d like to have quick access to recent photos taken with an iphone or image.canon , and somewhere where I can store both lightroom albums and exports

  2. centralizing my data storage, including many cloud services like:

  • iCloud Drive / Photo
  • Google Photos
  • Google Drive
  • OneDrive ( personal, 2TB; dev tenant, usually empty; work tenant - ~300mb)
  • Other cloud storage providers (S3, Azure, Mega, etc)
  • Local storage ( plex library, gopro library, archives )

The would be nices:

  1. Centralize and be a source for crashplan backups (current footprint in scope is about 10.5TB)

  2. Have some way to access files via mobile devices, my desktop, a web interface (or via those above cloud syncs), laptops, etc offsite. I have VPN via Ubiquiti UDMP and sometimes I use wireguard; but a MFA-protected web interface would be pretty handy.

  3. deduplication of the datastore - inevitably, the data sets I work with often are filled with duplication by nature, being able to leverage some form of dedupe likely would result in decent footprint gains

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Finally, I don’t need a TON of storage, I was thinking a 4 bay device would get me there and I don’t have much virtualization needs to run on it (I can lab in the cloud, or on a RPI, or the R710 though I’d likely want to get rid of it) - outside maybe a docker image to run something to support the above.

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Does synology check the boxes? Is there something else I can look at that’s somewhat cost effective and reliable enough I don’t have to get frustrated every time I look at it?