Follow-up: any recommendations for a beginner NAS? I'd love something cheap and simple; a 2-4 drive system with plug and play functionality would be awesome. I can live without streaming 4k videos or top-of-the-line features like that, though streaming 1080p would be nice.
I did a bit of research and wrote it up here:
https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/#...
I’m really only worried about my photos. Basically all of the photos and videos of my kid only exist on my phone and on iCloud, and even if I trusted Apple to not shut down my account, I’m one account compromise or dummy mistake away from a “delete” being synced and removing that content from all my devices forever.
I just have a script that runs nightly that runs icloud-pd to download all new photos and videos at full quality to the server in my basement. So that gets me a local copy totally disconnected from iCloud. From there, I have rclone encrypt and push up changes to Backblaze B2. Ends up costing me like $1.50/mo.
If you do this, make sure you put some monitoring in place. The 2FA on my Apple account tends to expire every few months and I need to go reauthenticate it.