I recently almost went down that road. What stopped me was the concern that if I died or got (too) demented or otherwise incapacitated, my wife would find such a setup (way) too much to deal with. And I guess a slight concern about everything being stored locally, though of course one can also back up to the cloud.
So I just went to the cloud instead. Pcloud offers a lifetime purchase so there are no annual fees, and while it's not super easy, my wife understands how to use the subset of available functionality that we're content with. And of course with our data not stored at home, break-in or house fire or hit-by-a-comet or whatever won't be an issue. And of course it solves the issue I initially set out to resolve, that of easily sharing files.
I was comfortable with Pcloud as they're based in Switzerland --- very good security/privacy laws --- and have been around for a bit over 10 years now.
OTOH, I recently read that while they're officially based in Switzerland, this is for marketing and that the company is really based in Bulgaria. I would have been more leery had I known this a priori, but it's worked well for the several months since I purchased membership. Bulgaria is sort-of in the EU and continuing to transition to be a full EU member state; they're part of NATO and support Ukraine, so hopefully no risk of Russian access to my data down the road? The underlying "no knowledge" tech should in theory protect against that (especially for the 'crypto' folder option).
They also have some pretty good tech from what I can see, though I hope they'll continue to improve their software; it works great for basic use, but their file collision solution is basically MIA. Not a real problem for just my wife and I sharing files.
Anyway, I just wanted to say that there are always trade-offs and a paid-for-life (depending on how long that really turns out to be) cloud solution has some merits over buying and maintaining your own local server at home. Especially as we continue to age.
Having posted the above in September, I wanted to follow up on something I (finally) learned today. I had mention above that a file collision solution is MIA, and --- yes, there isn't one. Stop reading now if you don't care about details.
For an "individual" (not a presumably more expensive "business") plan, there is no way to prevent overwriting of recently saved data when two or more people are editing a document at the same time. It took me three different interactions with pcloud support to establish this --- the first time the guy told me something that was just flat wrong.
So simple scenario: my wife and I happen to edit the some Microsoft Word document. She makes changes, I make changes. Then we each save and close the document. Whoever saves second 'wins', any changes made by the first-to-save person are overwritten and lost.
Not only that but it's silent, the only way you know this happens is if that person happens to see later that their changes have disappeared.
What they finally clarified to me in the most recent support email is that they have an "online edit tool", which presumably allows one to avoid this issue --- though maybe at the cost of having to change how you go about editing documents? --- but that this is only available if one has purchased a 'business plan'.
So caveat emptor there. Sharing files is the reason we got this in the first place. It just didn't occur to me that they wouldn't have some sort of solution to this basic (though admittedly not easy) problem.
My wife and I will just have to develop the habit of communicating whenever either of us edit a file that we consider to be shared between us, and not keep such documents open any longer than needed. Hopefully that will be good enough.
And in the context of the original thread here, I have no idea how this issue is (or isn't) handled when using a NAS (never had one).
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