Cloud providers like Google Drive and iCloud are incredible – they let me entry my most necessary information from any system, wherever – however the free storage is rarely sufficient.
Google provides 15GB whereas Apple provides an much more paltry 5GB of storage – however even the most important ‘free’ tier isn’t sufficient for the overwhelming majority of customers with 1000’s of pictures and movies, numerous information and extra to maintain secure.
So what do you do? You begin paying, after all. It begins off low cost with the bottom tier paid choice – £1.59/$1.99 for 100GB, within the case of Google’s cloud storage – and that’s sufficient to tide you over. For some time, anyway.
As positive as day follows evening, over time, you’ll start to fill all that cupboard space again up – even if you happen to delete information you now not want. Slowly, all these vacation snaps, movies of nights out, and even work paperwork, all add up.
And with each Google and Apple, it additionally contains storage linked to related providers like Gmail or iCloud, so any massive information you obtain in your inbox additional add to your quota.
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Once more, you don’t have any selection however to improve to the subsequent tier of storage, which for Google, is 200GB for £2.49/$2.99 per 30 days. That’s not dangerous, however go above that restrict and also you’ll face an enormous bounce not solely in storage but in addition in month-to-month value, at a whopping £7.99/$9.99 per 30 days for 2TB.
Like our rising storage wants, it provides up over time. That’s just below £96/$120 per 12 months if you happen to pay for the 2TB choice month-to-month, simply to retailer your information.
And so forth, and so forth. It’s a unending loop of filling up storage and paying for extra. It’s both that or say goodbye to years of valuable recollections.
Pay up, or lose entry
The worst half about Google and Apple’s monopoly on the cloud storage market is that they don’t simply deal with storage – they’re central to the digital expertise for many people. Google, for instance, handles not simply Drive however Gmail, Docs, Sheets and extra, whereas Apple equally handles iCloud e mail, iMessage and the like.
That will not sound like an enormous downside – one subscription covers a number of apps, in spite of everything – however it’s when you begin operating out of storage.
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Irrespective of whether or not you’re in camp Apple or Google, if you happen to run out of storage or miss a month-to-month cost, you don’t simply lose the power to add new information to your cloud storage – it additionally locks you out of different providers.
Meaning no entry to Gmail or iMessage if you happen to don’t pay up, and people are fairly central to the net expertise for a lot of.
That’s an excessive amount of energy for my liking – however what was I speculated to do? I’ve over 30,000 pictures and 5,000 movies tied to my Google Drive account, in addition to 1000’s of emails linked to my Gmail over time. The reply was easy ultimately; get a NAS drive.
UGreen’s newest NAS is the right treatment
NAS drives had been all the craze in computing earlier than the times of cloud storage, providing oodles of native storage accessible by way of your property community. However regardless of a lull in curiosity over the previous few years, the {hardware} is extra succesful than ever.
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That’s definitely the case with the UGreen NASync DH4300 Plus, which was launched on the tail-end of 2025.
The larger brother to the DH2300, the DH4300 Plus is a four-bay SATA NAS drive that helps as much as 120TB of storage – 30TB per drive – for frankly huge quantities of storage. It’s powered by an 8-core processor and sports activities 8GB of RAM to maintain issues operating easily, and its 2.5GbE LAN port boasts switch speeds of as much as 312.5MB/s relying on your property setup. Protected to say, it’s a little bit of a beast.
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However regardless of its intimidating spec sheet, it was an absolute breeze to arrange; all I needed to do was insert the HDDs, plug it into my router by way of the supplied high-speed Ethernet cable and energy it on. From there, all the pieces else was dealt with by way of the UGreen NAS companion app, and setup took not more than a few minutes – a far cry from the early days of NAS drive networking setup.
That’s once I might begin, what I affectionately referred to as Operation Get Away From Google Drive As Quickly As Doable, or OGAFGDASAP. Catchy, I do know.
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Getting out from Google’s clutches
This half was surprisingly straightforward; due to EU guidelines (gotta love the Europeans), cloud storage suppliers like Google and Apple should make it straightforward to both obtain all of your knowledge or switch it to a different (ideally cheaper) service.
For me, that meant going to Google Takeout, choosing the info I wished to obtain – my Google Pictures library and my Drive contents – and requesting a obtain hyperlink. As soon as I had the hyperlink, I downloaded the (frankly huge) almost 300GB of information on my PC, and extracted the ZIP information to my NAS drive by way of my residence community.
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However why cease at Google? I additionally pay for iCloud storage for once I’m testing the very best iPhones, and that isn’t all that usually, so I repeated the method, this time with iCloud.
Now, that did introduce just a few points – the most important being duplicate pictures the place the pictures had been backed up on each Apple and Google cloud servers – however UGreen probably anticipated this concern. There’s baked-in AI accessible by way of the companion app on each PC and cellular that permits you to simply establish and delete duplicate pictures. It cleared almost 10,000 duplicate photos for me within the house of some minutes.
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Now, all I’ve to do is open the UGreen companion app on my telephone, and all my pictures and movies are there ready for me, full with options like customized folders and facial recognition we’ve come to count on from the large platforms.
And regardless of being linked to my residence community, I can entry my information from wherever with an web connection by way of UGreen’s cloud service community. It doesn’t really retailer your information within the cloud; quite, it simply offers cloud-based entry to the drive, which implies you don’t must faff round with port forwarding as you do with extra primary drives.
Not only for community storage both
Now the great thing about the UGreen NASync DH4300 Plus is that it’s not simply for community storage. With a reasonably highly effective spec beneath the hood, the NAS drive also can run full apps that may massively broaden what it may possibly do.
It meant that, quite than forking out £112 for a Residence Assistant Inexperienced to get extra superior management over my sensible residence tech, I might set up and run it immediately from my NAS drive – with nice outcomes, would possibly I add.
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It’s not the one app both; there’s really an app retailer accessible by way of the app that provides you entry to a spread of apps together with a Google Docs, Sheets and Slides various referred to as On-line Workplace you can entry by way of browser from any PC, additional decreasing my reliance on Google’s cloud-based providers.
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There’s additionally Docker help, so relying in your stage of tech data, you may run different customized apps immediately from the NAS.
Sure, it’s an costly upfront value, however it’ll save you numerous in the long term, and with the UGreen DH4300 Plus particularly, there’s way more to it than merely appearing as a technique to again up your pictures and movies. Goodbye, Google Drive. I positively received’t miss you.
