💾 Considering a NAS for home backup, is the setup hassle actually worth it for a small family?

Our family currently backs up photos and important documents across a fairly messy scattered combination of two different external hard drives, one aging laptop's internal storage, and a cloud storage plan that we are genuinely close to outgrowing given how much photo and video content we all seem to keep accumulating steadily over time from various phones and cameras used by different family members. A friend who is considerably more technically inclined than I am suggested setting up a proper NAS device instead, a small dedicated storage box that would sit at home and let everyone in the family back up to one single centralized place automatically, accessible from multiple different devices without needing to constantly juggle physical external drives being passed around or manually copying specific files back and forth between different people each time. The actual initial cost is genuinely higher than I expected going into this research, comparable to a decent mid range laptop honestly, and the setup process itself sounds noticeably more involved than simply plugging in a regular external hard drive the way we currently do things now, involving proper network configuration and some genuinely unfamiliar new technical terminology that none of us in the family have any real prior experience with at all. What appeals to me most about the actual concept itself is having one single reliable, centralized place for everything rather than our current genuinely scattered approach, plus most models apparently support some kind of proper redundancy so a single drive failing does not necessarily mean losing everything entirely all at once the way it currently would with our present setup. Nobody in my immediate family beyond myself is particularly technical though, which makes me specifically wonder whether the actual ongoing maintenance and occasional troubleshooting required might genuinely become a real ongoing burden falling entirely on just me personally rather than something the whole family can actually manage together going forward. For families who have actually made this specific switch themselves already, was the real initial setup hassle genuinely worth it long term, and how much actual ongoing maintenance has it truly required from you personally since that initial setup process itself?

Went with a two bay entry level model instead of anything fancier, kept the upfront cost closer to what a budget laptop would cost rather than a mid range one like you are describing here. Plenty enough storage and redundancy for a small family's actual photo and document needs without paying extra for features none of us would ever realistically use anyway.

A drive failed on mine about eight months after setup, and the redundancy setup meant we lost absolutely nothing, just swapped the failed drive out and let it rebuild automatically overnight without any real drama. That single moment alone justified the entire upfront cost for me personally, would have been an actual disaster with our old external drive setup instead.

Same worry crossed my mind before setting mine up two years ago, ended up being the only one who ever touches the actual settings while everyone else just saves files to it without any real awareness of what happens behind the scenes. Turned out fine though, maybe twenty minutes of actual maintenance every few months once the initial setup itself was properly done.