It is not fun to wake up and learn that a firmware update killed your network attached storage.

Looks like that is what happened to my QNAP. It is in an infinite loop of trying to boot. Of course, that finally has made me ask the question that I should have asked earlier:  Do I really need a NAS? Their interfaces are so archaic and old school. And as devices, they are so nerdy, complicated and unwieldy. I have never been able to come to grips with them.

As an amateur photographer, I wonder if I should get a simpler storage system? My primary storage is photos — I copy them on portable SSD drives. I don’t re-use my SD cards. I used to load them on QNAP and then sync to B2. I upload selected photos for editing and finished photos to Adobe Cloud. And if that was not enough, my now dead NAS had a copy of all my photos and then it synced to Backblaze B2. 

In other words, I am the king of overkill considering I don’t even edit most of my photos. And they usually stay in archive mode. At this point, I want to make my photo storage workflow simpler. Any suggestions?

PS: I uploaded most of my “selects” which is two-star or higher in Lightroom language to Adobe Cloud. For now, this seems to be the easiest solution — even if it means paying Adobe a big tax every year.