A network-attached storage box on your own shelf, or storage in someone else’s datacentre: the argument between them is usually conducted with each side quoting its best numbers. The honest comparison prices everything - and it still does not produce one winner, because the two are good at different jobs.
The real cost of a NAS
The sticker price is a two-bay enclosure plus drives. The real ledger is longer:
Hardware amortisation. Enclosure and drives have working lives. Drives in continuous service want replacing on a schedule, and the enclosure itself will eventually age out of software support - divide the total by five to seven years for the honest monthly figure.
Redundancy is not extra storage. Mirroring two 8 TB drives yields 8 TB of usable space, not 16. RAID protects uptime against a drive failure; as we note in the 3-2-1 guide, it replicates deletions instantly and is therefore not a backup.
Power, always on. A small NAS drawing 20 to 40 watts around the clock is a real line on a yearly electricity bill.
Your Saturdays. Firmware updates, drive health monitoring, the RAID rebuild that takes a nervous day and a half. Each is small; the subscription is you.
The offsite copy you still need. A NAS in your house shares your house’s risks - fire, flood, theft, surge. A serious NAS setup therefore includes replication to somewhere else, which is usually cloud storage anyway.
The real cost of cloud
Cloud pricing is more legible - a monthly rate per terabyte - with two fine print items worth checking: whether downloads cost extra, which matters enormously on restore day, and whether the archive tier you were quoted has retrieval delays and minimums. The sizing arithmetic in how much storage you need turns the rate into an actual number.
Against that: no hardware to buy or bury, durability engineered across professionally run infrastructure, offsite by definition, and upkeep measured in zero Saturdays.
Where each genuinely wins
| NAS | Cloud | |
|---|---|---|
| Large media over LAN | Excellent - wire speed | Limited by your connection |
| Offsite protection | Only with extra setup | By definition |
| Upkeep | Yours, ongoing | None |
| Cost at 20+ TB, multi-year | Often cheaper | Subscription scales linearly |
| Access away from home | VPN or port forwarding | A login |
| Durability engineering | One box, your discipline | Redundant by design |
A NAS earns its place when the working set is huge and local: video editing off a wire-speed share, a media library serving the living room, multi-terabyte archives where multi-year economics favour owned hardware - and the owner enjoys the administration, which is load-bearing.
Cloud wins when the priority is the files surviving anything that happens to your building, with access from anywhere and no operational duties.
The combination is the actual answer
For most people weighing this, the strongest setup is not either/or. Working files and irreplaceables live in cloud storage with versioning; the NAS, if you run one, holds the bulky local set and replicates its irreplaceable subset offsite. That is the 3-2-1 rule assembling itself from parts that each do what they are best at.
Worth knowing when comparing: much of what people buy a NAS for is the protocols rather than the shelf. If the attraction is mounting storage as a drive, pointing backup tools at it, or scripting against it - we expose WebDAV, an S3-compatible API that rclone speaks natively, and SFTP on every account, which delivers the NAS-style workflows without owning the hardware. And NAS devices themselves back up to S3-compatible storage as a standard feature, which is exactly the server backup pattern pointed at your own shelf.
Deciding in one paragraph
Price the NAS honestly over five years including drives, power and your time. Price the cloud at your real collection size, egress included. If the answer is still the NAS, it is probably for a good reason - speed or scale - and it still wants a cloud leg behind it. If the honest ledger surprised you, the box was never the cheap option; it was the hobby option, which is a fine thing to choose on purpose.
Frequently asked questions
Is a NAS cheaper than cloud storage?
At large capacities over several years, often yes on hardware alone. Priced honestly with drive replacements, power and your maintenance time, the gap narrows, and a NAS still needs an offsite copy, which usually means paying for cloud storage anyway.
Is a NAS a backup?
A NAS in your home shares your home's risks, so on its own it is local storage, not a backup. It becomes part of a backup strategy when it replicates to somewhere physically separate.
Can I get NAS-style features without buying hardware?
Mostly yes. Mounting storage as a drive, SFTP access, rclone automation and S3 APIs are protocol features, and cloud services that expose them, dosya included, cover the common NAS workflows without the shelf.
