I swear by my NAS, but I wouldn’t trust it without a Google One subscription

I grew up in the physical media era when every document and file I owned was stored on a device I could physically hold in my hands. Stacks of floppy disks, tower racks full of CDs, several external hard disks, and dozens of USB sticks and SD cards; I’ve had them all, carried them all, and saved my data on them all.

But as the years progressed, I saw myself shift more towards the cloud. The convenience of accessing everything from anywhere without having to physically carry it was life-changing around the late 2000s with the arrival of Dropbox. I could work on my pharmacology thesis and hospital study cases from the university’s computer and then continue writing from my laptop at home. It was such a fantastic commodity. Still, I made the effort to keep a local copy of everything — I was still very skeptical of tech and lived in a country where the average connection speed was still 2Mbps in 2020 and where electricity blackouts were a way of life, so I had to have backups everywhere and local access to everything.