I replaced my NAS with Google Drive for a month and barely noticed

Karandeep Singh / Android Authority

I didn’t intend to do this experiment, but my month-long trip away from home forced me to shut down my NAS for a good few weeks. What I expected to be a temporary inconvenience ended up feeling… normal. The NAS is such an ingrained part of my local file access workflow that I assumed I’d miss it immediately, but with a portable SSD in my hand and Google Drive practically moving everywhere with me, I had little reason to think about my home setup at all.

For the most part, everything just worked, although there were still a couple of moments where a local network storage solution would have been more suitable.

Did you switch from a NAS to cloud storage? 136 votes I rely mostly on cloud now 35 % I use both NAS and cloud 24 % I prefer NAS/local storage 35 % I don’t use either 6 %

We often underestimate cloud storage

Rita El Khoury / Android Authority

The biggest advantage of local network storage is speed and near round-the-clock uptime. These are infrastructural benefits: your server won’t go down even when the internet does, and it’s necessary for mission-critical scenarios where you simply can’t afford to lose connection to your data. But beyond that, cloud storage often wins on convenience, and over time, you gravitate towards that convenience.

That network effect alone makes Google Drive a more productive solution for day-to-day work.

Google Drive, in particular, has a much more polished interface than what most enterprise-y NAS software offers, and it also benefits from its sheer spread. You can share a link without a second thought, knowing the other person already uses Google Drive. That network effect alone makes it a more productive solution for day-to-day work. It also blends into the background, quietly doing its job.

A NAS, on the other hand, is closer to running your own server, which means you are the IT manager who has to set it up, maintain it, and troubleshoot it when something breaks. You can’t simply raise a support ticket as you do with Google Drive and move on.

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