Building a NAS won't always save you money, but it's worth investing in anyway
There are ways to make it work for you to save a lot of money, but for a true storage solution, it's arguably more expensive.
It's a common assumption that a home-built NAS beats cloud storage when it comes to storage pricing, even when it's easy to point to Backblaze's $6 per TB-month rate and say, "Just use the cloud; hardware is a sunk cost." That statement will often be supported by the need for a 3-2-1 backup strategy, where an off-site backup is crucial in the event of catastrophic data loss. On the one hand, it can be perfectly correct to assert that a cheap cloud-based provider is a more cost-effective strategy for long-term storage; that's only half the story. On the other hand, a NAS can work out to be more expensive in the long run, even if it's worth it.
