A quick Google Internet search (feel free to replace our mental default of 'Google' to your search engine of choice in that sentence!) of the phrase 'de-Googling' will show a wide range of articles, Reddit posts, and personalised journeys of people going through the process of surgically removing themselves from the Google ecosystem.

We all got ourselves stuck in the quicksand of the Google suite of products because of the original convenience benefits of linked services working together in fairly smart ways. I remember the enjoyment of seeing location metadata embedded into my photos so that I could see a cool 'journey' of my holidays as I trekked between cities. Being able to set reminders & tasks based on specific sentences in my Gmail emails seemed sensible enough. But over time we've all felt the creep factor increase more and more. With the huge amount of information captured from mobile phones over the last decade or so, the data collection ecosystem has gone into overdrive.

I've had a NAS for about 18 months now, ever since I was able to get an old Synology DS216se second-hand. I had wanted to control & manage my own media library instead of relying on streaming services, especially as licencing issues mean that certain movies or albums weren't available over time. I also started to get sick of the algorithms that prioritised a certain way of listening or watching media; having direct control was more important to me.

I had held onto an old 1TB external hard drive which had my music collection and a smattering of ripped DVDs and TV series, so I wasn't starting from zero. In my opinion, this is the biggest requirement for someone to consider getting a NAS. If you don't have a large collection of files, just stick to your desktop PC or laptop.