A few weeks ago, I received an email I had been expecting for some time: my Western Digital NAS will soon exit support and will no longer receive security updates. By the time the April 2022 expiration date arrives, we will have had a good, seven-year run, so I guess I can’t complain too much. And for whatever it’s worth, the NAS was always a sort of secondary backup anyway, as I found it easier to find content on OneDrive, and the local network performance has never been all that great. Regardless, I was going to have to figure something out, given my desire to move to a more mobile lifestyle. So let me briefly ponder what (might) be next in this department.

As you may remember, I purchased the WD My Cloud EX2 in early 2015, a few months after moving to Thurrott.com. As I wrote at the time, my goal was to implement a local backup to supplement my cloud-based data sync and backup. In a What I Use article about a month later, I noted that this prosumer NAS was replacing a long line of local storage solutions that ranged from several actual Windows Server-based servers to various external hard drives. And at the time I was pretty impressed with its simplicity and performance. (I find that latter praise far-fetched today, given how bad the performance is now.)