Of the myriad electronic devices I’ve purchased recently, this is by far the most expensive. After years of buying external hard drives and then a two-drive RAID array, I had no choice but to graduate to my first NAS system. I mean, I guess I could stop creating so many video files, and then I wouldn’t need bigger and more expensive storage solutions, but that’s not happening.

I can’t say I’m thrilled about it. It’s not the sort of thing one gets excited about. It’s no pan tilter. I’m eager to get it set up, but only so I can move on with my life. About 18 months ago, my oldest external drive crashed, and I lost a lot of files. I lost everything related to my cleaning business, which was a huge part of my life for most of the first two decades of this century. And since the one YouTube channel I have that makes money is about cleaning, it would be really nice to have all of that footage. I’ve learned my lesson, though, and I don’t want to lose any more footage, so I’m backing up what I’ve got before it’s lost.

I’ve spent all day uploading files to my new NAS. I can’t figure out how to hook my computer up to the NAS directly, which is quite annoying. It recognizes that I’ve hooked something up to it, but it doesn’t see any of the contents on the drive. So, my only option is to send files, wirelessly, through the network, and I have no doubt that that takes significantly longer than it would if the two drives were connected directly to each other.

This is the part of computers I don’t like. I’m not interested in poking around under the hood of my computers. I just want to start them up and go. This is why I bristle when I hear people say they prefer Android and Windows over Apple, because they’re not as restrictive and they can do what they want with their devices. Call me what you will, I just want shit to work. So far, this new NAS “works,” but it doesn’t work as well or intuitively as I would like.

As long as I can get all of my files backed up and get back to work, then I’ll be happy. I just want to be able to work without worrying about my drive crashing, so the sooner I get everything onto my new NAS, the better.