Need shareable storage in my house, not sure which route to go

For ease of use, probably best to go with a QNAP or Synology NAS, buy redundant drives, and you're off and running.

For something more scalable, TrueNAS is definitely the way to go. It's what I personally use for my home and cloud storage.

Just to add on to the other replies if you want to keep using google drive to remotely access or backup to the cloud most NASs will allow you to connect your google account in order to send the information from the NAS for backup or share data both directions to remotely access and save the information back to your NAS.

the Microsoft Office 365 subscription is pretty cheap and comes with 1TB of OneDrive

Correct on how you purchase. Look at NewEgg as well in addition to Amazon. Even if you buy a five drive unit, you don’t need five drives to start.

I won’t get into exactly how many in each type of RAID, etc. there is a calculator on the synology website. Don’t buy the biggest drives available, go a couple of TB “down” to save money. Always buy NAS rated drives (red label for western digital.) I took a perfectly functioning black (non NAS rated drive) in as a fourth drive in the NAS and the extra vibration killed it in under a month.

It may be worth it to buy from a well rated seller in eBay, the NAS shell essentially has one moving part (the fan,) and I haven’t killed one yet. Like most NAS buyers, I bought one, and then upgraded it within 3 years, and now have an empty 1520+ sitting in a box, lol.

How much storage do you need? Sounds way overkill for a couple of TB. Pay Microsoft or Google a few more bucks a month vs spending 1k and frustration on setup and support if you are not IT savvy.

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We were using a google drive to share between computers and such but recently reached the storage capacity of my laptop with and was not able to store anymore on the google drive?

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OP - I know everyone is talking about NAS and other cloud storage alternatives, but this may be a simple fix.

Google Drive has two settings: “stream” or “mirror.” When you “stream,” the files are not permanently stored on your device. They’re downloaded to your device from the cloud whenever you open them. When you “mirror,” the files are stored both on your device and in the cloud. Google Drive will sync the cloud version whenever you make changes to the file locally (or vice versa).

When you sync local files/folders on your device to Google Drive, you can only mirror. But your actual MyDrive can be set to either mirror or stream. If you’re saying you ran out of Google Drive storage because your laptop is full, it makes me think you have it set to mirror or you aren’t using MyDrive at all and are only using mirrored local folders.

Here’s a Google support article explaining the difference and how to change the settings: LINK

If you have your MyDrive set to mirror, you might be able to free up space on your laptop and gain additional Google Drive storage just by switching it to stream. The downside, of course, is that you need an internet connection to access streamed files.

FWIW OneDrive has similar functionality, but you can mirror/unload individual files/folders to manage local storage. At least the enterprise version of OneDrive. I was kind of shocked when I realized how much storage space was being used on my work laptop by OneDrive sync.

Synology is a little pricey but dead simple, reliable, and useful.

I have one at home, one at work.
At work, it’s a domain server, each user has a private folder, access to certain shares depending on roles, and each entire computer is imaged nightly for replacement should a failure happen (and then I just have a simple RAID1).


At home, wife + my photos back up into a single stream, then I have shares for each of my siblings to do the same with selected photos (so we all dump into a common path for shared albums that anyone can have access to). I did give them each a little share with unique ID and password, but none have a real need for such a thing (I just have gig up/down service without real storage limits which could occasionally be a useful thing in some circumstances).
I image every computer in the house nightly as well


I do wish there was a better iPhone backup on it, but overall, the device is solid. I think I have an 1821+ at home and 1621+ at the office. Plenty for what I need. If I want virtualization, I’ll buy a used SFF desktop long before I shell out for a Xeon model. The specs, though meager, are adequate for everything I’ve used it for.

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LemmyLives

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Bro up in here waxing poetic life advice far beyond the average mouth breathing OT baw’s grasp. Pop always asking me, “son, who has the brain? You or the hammer?”

This is exactly why the Logitech Harmony system was so popular in my household. Simple easy to use. Keeps the noise about it “not working” to a minimum.

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You’re likely going to want to back up portions of your NAS to another NAS or to cloud service like S3 Glacier, or Backblaze B2 NAS cloud backup (which I use.)

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I'll stress this a bit more, backups are crucial (especially if you are running businesses) and while a NAS can be a good piece of your backup strategy, you need more than that.

Follow the 3-2-1 backup rule: 3+ copies of important data on 2+ different types of storage with 1+ off-site. I will also add that you should have immutable snapshots or version history of files in the case of a ransomware attack. Nothing worse than having your files locked and then checking your backups and they're all locked too.

The cloud services handle pretty much all of that for you. You typically have a local copy, and the cloud service stores multiple off-site copies and sometimes with version history as well. If you switch to a local NAS, you should arrange your own off-site backup and immutable snapshots. I believe Synology has tools to make this easy.