_TL;DR_ — the answer to your two questions is: 1. Aye! 2. For me, most definitely. Your mileage may vary. It all depends on what you _need_ to do with your files, and what you _expect_ from a NAS (compared to other alternatives). Now for the (very) long and exhaustive reply... It seems to me that I've 'always' had a file server in my home LAN. It started to be an old box just running Linux. Then, for many many years (well beyond its expected lifetime!), I had an Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive (see [Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive Review - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrQPe4GZzY8)). It used just one single, pretty ordinary HDD, so after 5-6 years, when it started to fail, I could easily swap it by a new one and reinstall the Linux embedded system it had. Ironically, the hardest thing to replace was the mini-fan (I still have a spare or two lying around) which kept the whole thing cool... Besides backups — mostly using Time Machine — I naturally used it as a home media server. It did its job well — especially for music — and already supported a few useful remote utilities (some of which required third-party VPN software, from a company that has long since ceased operations). But once you hacked it to get SSH access, you could pretty much do whatever you wished with the underlying Linux system. Alas, there wasn't really a _lot_ you could do, since it didn't ship a compiler, and it wasn't that trivial to cross-compile things for the device (basically because of some proprietary libraries that had to be linked with). But there were still _some_ things you could do. And, of course, there was always the choice of installing something like [OpenWRT](https://openwrt.org)... At some point, I managed to get it to store backups from my 'personal' server(s) running on data centres providing VPS and/or bare metal leased hardware, and vice-versa. It was a cheap way of getting reasonable backups from those server(s), and at least I would always have those backups stored where I could get at them easily. Imagine the worst-case scenario: the company hosting your remote server goes bankrupt or has a major fire that destroys their data centre, thus forcing them to abruptly cease operations, disconnecting all servers overnight, as well as wherever they used to back up them — and you're stuck. This didn't ever happen to me, of course, but knowing that I was prepared for such an eventuality let me sleep well at night (the reverse was also true: if _our_ home got destroyed by an earthquake or a domes