Network Attached Storage (NAS)
A storage device that is connected to your home network and allows stored files to be easily accessed by devices on that network or across the internet.
My Personal NAS
I personally have a Synology 720+ set up at my parents house with 16TB of storage with 8TB of effective storage in RAID 1 for redundancy. I setup my entire family to have their phone’s backup their photos with the Synology Photos app.
Reasoning
The biggest reason why I decided to select a Synology NAS is because of their OS support and built in features. I had just gone through an Arch Linux phase after being inspired by this XMonad video and I was very very tried of doing everything myself and having constant versioning issues. I felt like every time I tried to update a package or get two packages to work well together I would go down a rabbit hole of untangling dependencies and I had gotten sick of it. I wanted something that just worked. I looked into NextCloud and it looked promising but when I found Synology it looked even more hands off.
My Synology NAS has been easy to manage for the most part and overall unproblematic.