6 Cool Things You Can Do With Your NAS

so there's this dude right uh in america this was like in 96 he's driving along he's in the soma a napa wine region he's driving along he's going to see his missus he's not seen her in ages right he's driving down he's thinking oh my god what a beautiful scene there is outside and he jumps out of his car he looks out the window and there's this luscious green burden like oh it's beautiful absolutely stunning anyway he takes a picture he gets his camera he's a bit he's a bit dab with a camera so he goes outside and he takes this picture and he goes to see his misses he goes oh look at this picture it's fantastic and he's really really pleased with it he's double chuffed with it so he pops it on you know it's 96 it's on the in there it's not that great but he puts it out there and you know a few people buy it he sells it a few people knock her and i think they do like 50 quid 90 quid here or there and try and buy it and then this other guy turns up and this guy turns up and goes i really like that picture i really really like that picture so he goes in and it goes in heavy and says do you know what i want that picture i really really want to buy it and i want to own it for perpetuity i want to own it forever and the guy was like it's a bit expensive i'm not just going to hand that over to you so they they haggle they buy they bar they go through and eventually changes ads for six figures six figures hundred two hundred thousand dollars this photo goes for a photo for under two hundred thousand dollars and you know that phobo it's the windows xp background microsoft went on to sell 17 million copies of windows xp with that lovely luscious green background i'll be honest i think he got a bit short changed [Music] hello and welcome back and today we want to talk about nas i know right big big shock but today we want to talk about network attached storage that you've already purchased you've already bought one you've had it knocking around for a few months maybe a few years and it's running some decent backups it's backing up your phone your laptop you all your devices around your home you've got your regular backups it's going to some usb and you go oh that thing's doing its job i think i'll go to bed but there's more to it than that do you know there's loads of stuff these things do every now and then we get comments in the section below or over on nas compares of lots of people that still don't know a lot of the frankly quite cool things these devices can do they buy them because they need to do home or business backups and then somewhere down the line they find out after a number of years that they could have been having some real fun along with these devices along the way so today we're going to talk about a bunch of things that you can do with nas aside from having your backups in place these are the stuff where you want to use these devices for fun maybe it's personally maybe it's for business maybe it's just a muck around eddie these devices what are some of the things that people can do with network attached storage other than backups ah the most popular feature is probably multimedia now of course of course if you have like video station or in qnap um uh that's called windows video stations yeah this video on the video station yeah uh you can actually make your own netflix in a way if you have some uh movies purchased on your media server as well yeah or you can install plex as well so put those movies on the nas and um you can share those videos with your grandma with your cousins weirdly you can do that so you can create their accounts or just simply send them a link shared link up to your video so they can stream it remotely and watch those videos but it's the metadata isn't it you also get subtitles uh it's all automatic automatically from subtitle websites and stuff like that transcoding so if those are internet connections are slow a home is going to convert the video into something smaller so it could be streamed through your broadband cable but it's i think when whenever you look at like netflix and stuff like that and a lot of us pay monthly for netflix or amazon video and stuff like that you're paying five 10 or a month maybe 15 if you go to those multi-users the more devices you have the more you have to pay and all of that is for me that you don't own and then like after they refresh the library you don't have access to it anymore now please do you know we've been collecting digital media now for decades when the last time you bought a dvd you graham when's the last time you bought that i hope your name's graham freaked out a guy called graham um but when like we all of our media is digital we have hard drives full of media we've collected media over the years and when we try to present it in now's a lot of people think that multimedia on a nas is presented in this breadcrumb file folder way over dlna and it's just not the case anymore building your own netflix with one of these devices is stupendously easy and with metadata being ripped from the internet movie database and all these different cover art websites and rotten tomatoes for the reviews trailers from online resources the result is that you can create the slick user interface of netflix for you and your friends and your family and your nan apparently exactly right and not just and not just our videos also uh audio you probably got so many audio cds you got audio stations as well and snore g and then qnap so just put all those cds into your computer or have usb external uh cd uh reader on your nas and and just rip all those cds feed them into a nas and uh that's it because even cds over at age 10 years 15 years they're just going to fade out and they're not going to work anymore put them on a nas they're just gonna last there for decades and if you put them on plex plex will scrape the metadata for those albums as well and that's all included and again plex is free unless you're gonna use like the plex pass with the extra bells and whistles which a lot of us don't use um you can get away with using that for free you've already bought them as make the most of it um i mean for me one of the things i like about nas it's probably a little bit more advanced and dare i say at this end of the table one of the other cool things you can do is to muck around with virtual machines for those unaware vms are virtual equivalent of physical computers now you still need a keyboard a mouse or a monitor or a remote control or something to interact with it but it is a virtual equivalent of a physical computer why is it worth playing around with vms whether you want to test out other os's whether you want to check updates by cloning your existing computer and testing out a hyper you know on a hypervisor and testing a hypothetical setup there for you or you can do stuff you muck around with linux with linux you can install things like retro arch and launch box and turn one of these into not only your backups but a fully fledged arcade machine with an hdmi out keyboard and a mouse four hours sofa and a bag of popcorn there's loads of things you can do with virtual machines and most people associate virtual machines with work not play but i do think virtual machines are incredibly elaborate these days and what you can do with them and the ease with which you can use them if you use um when a lot of time you use the vm um probably last week just for testing out yeah more likely i'm using uh uh docker which is cool similar like virtual machine but it's like um a really compressed version at least just a you know image of an app in a way and then when you look about vms you've got to bear in mind that and again we tried we kind of discussed before this video so we weren't going to mention brands too much but in some areas of this list the brands have to be called out and qnap on the other hand these guys probably do the best vms out there in terms of how you can host them they've got those three applications they've got their own container app they've got their own ubuntu station application and they've got their own virtualization station and all of them have got app centers and vm centers where instead of finding and sourcing a vm alternatively you can install a vm on these via containers via ubuntu and linux station and via virtualization station in about two to three clicks it downloads the vm for deployment and installs it and sets it up directly from within the box something that's not available from any other brand so you've got to give them a call out on that what else if it gets better you can actually add a graphics card so you can boost your virtual machine with a gtx 1050 or something or something but they're obviously back to the gaming machine you can link to lan ports you can link to usb ports you can virtually connect all those external connectivity to your internal virtual virtual machine turn this into a computer a high-end computer that while it's simultaneously still doing all of those backups it works the nas together it's the hypervisor living with on qts but anything else with regards to what people can do yeah definitely there's other things like for example replacing your google drive or dropbox thing so you can create your own uh on strong g drive something called drive or in qnub is called qsync so you have your folder on your pc where you can whatever files you put in the folder it's going to be synchronized to your other laptop another computer another a phone a tablet a bomb synchronization what i quite like is a lot of people when they come to nas they come off the back of google drive dropbox and stuff like that and they're used to that user interface in that element of space and nazis allow you to create your very own dropbox your very own google drive that is you say to like a friend or a colleague or a family your nan a man she's getting a lot of name checks super dead she is super dead um but don't laugh but you can send like a friend just go look there's your area of space these are your folders this is your space with your password your login to access anywhere in the world and i think that's quite cool to allow friends or family whether you're going to be selling it and renting that space out naughty naughty or you're going to be that's allowing people to have their own area of space and then using those synchronization tools to back up their devices yes it's all living within the onenous but it's quite nice to allow you to kind of host your own google drive that's pretty cool another thing i think a lot of people can do that's quite fun with their nas that they never really use and this is quite a recent one and you know i know this is going to divide opinion quite substantially but you can still plot and farm cheer it's still an option out there a number of you have seen your nas that you're running for 24 7 and you've just gone wrong let's do all the backups what else should it do it's just sitting there eating up electricity sitting in the corner of the room what can i do with my nails and one of the popular things right now for people to do is to start knocking out some chia they put in some ssds and then some enterprise level media to create those little plots in the hope that they can strike it lucky and get some geocoin if you own a nas you've sort of got all of the equipment you need you just need a lot more space to play around with and you probably need some parallel ssds but the majority of these nazis arrive with ways in which you can do that and now certain brands have started introducing their own you know i'm not going to say first party asks but qnap have got their own chia app but again it's third party so it's in qnap club but the people that are making it are people that make a lot of the apps in that center so it is getting a lot of support and monitor and although it's more of a user interface and not something that makes it any easier in the grand scheme of things you can till this big wave of people that are using their nas and they want to make the most of this big noisy box in the corner of the room and no it's a good opportunity because chia coin value has dropped down to four hundred dollars it was around two thousand dollars so there is actually good time now to get in because it will probably climb up to two one of the people at this table uh is actually doing mining can you tell but no no it's i think it's very good anything else oh yeah the thing what i'm using usually mostly is for surveillance so yeah so you connect your ip cameras up your garage from garden by garden and whenever there is a movement or you can set up your own triggers what happens you know and then you get notification on your phone so when you're away or home you just see oh there's not a question just click oh yeah but that's what's happening like a cat crossing or burglar taking your fridge and things like that and you can happen man what happened you can move camera around left right you know if you go to the movement i think a lot i think a lot of people they know they can use a nas for surveillance but they don't realize the extent to which they can use it one because it's kind of a cart before the whole situation where they've got the narrows they've installed the software but they don't have any cameras and they've gone okay and then they walk away but i think a lot of you really should take the time to look at the surveillance software and also the cameras that are supported there was a time when nasa's first integrated uh nvr software um you know this is when axis own software ruled the roof for enterprise and milestone stuff like that but now not only is the software bundled in with some camera licenses on your nan systems and the level of control can be done by your browser and there's client apps too but the cost of the average ip camera is ridiculously low going as low in some cases as to some onviv onvif which is a kind of generic support default structure knocking around for about 30 maybe 40 quid with attacks you can even use your old mobile phones and turn mobile phones into ip cameras can't you know phones are in a draw not doing anything you can even attach usb cameras to some of these devices and then boom you've got another camera the surveillance element of a nas if it's just going to sit there and do nothing you might as well take advantage of its surveillance capabilities i think most users i know that owner nas even didn't know about the surveillance stuff or they knew about it but it seemed like a bit of a faff and i'm really glad that on in of all the subjects on these channels that we talked about that we've really educated people on as much as we can surveillance has been a big one but i mean like for yourself surveillance when did you use surveillance immediately when you brought your first snaps yeah yeah straight away now because before i was using ip cameras on their own but it's not very straightforward because then you need to connect to each camera separately and this is not easy sometimes even if you want to get some notifications your phone you need to set up ipv5 forwarding and then that opens some dangers to your internal network and uh this is not good because with synology it creates this sub private tunnel with synology server so when you're connecting to your synology or qnap quick connect you go through encrypted channel into your nas that's how you connect so it's more secure than um going through your router straight away using port forwarding it's not great and the last thing probably to end this video on you can use it for kind of human innovation you can there's a lot of projects out there that you can install in docker form there used to be a lot more apps that did it but now it's the majority of it is in um docker form that you can run these tools that could be used for science there's boink and folding at home those are two of the biggest ones that allow you to install a container on your now so when the nas isn't being used the resources that are running idle can then be used for science human innovation medical science breaking down genome dna that sort of thing and i think it is almost depressing how few people don't know about that one given the sheer number of these devices out there in the world both in home and business and the fact that short of the one things like surveillance where there's a heavy right action happening a lot of the time these devices are doing nothing and that hardware it's a real shame it's not being used for other things and do look at our boi nc and folding at home these are things that you can install on your nas so that those resources are actually being used for the greater good and the greater society when you're not using them and i think that's probably the best thing on this list but then what can i say bit of a boy scout but i think that's it these are a bunch of things that you can do with your nas other than just using it for general storage these things are incredibly capable and we have barely scratched the surface so if you're using a nas for multiple things right now a stuff that isn't on this list that you're pretty pleased with or it was the reason that you're able to tell a mate you know what buyer nas it can whatever that is do let us know in the comments click like if you enjoyed the video and subscribe to learn more and of course visit us over at the free advice section in the link in the description over at nas compares it is genuinely a free advice section there doesn't cost you anything you chuck in your query what you need help with in data storage and two humans me and eddie the web guy will answer your query it might take us an extra day or so to answer your inquiry let's be honest we've all got lives and it's sunny outside but we will answer every email eddie if i missed anything yeah like always thanks a lot mate i'll see you next time

Channel: NASCompares

Views: 20,664

Keywords: NAS Server, NAS Drive, NAS Guide, NAS Setup Guide, Synology NAS, QNAP NAS, Synology NAS Guide, QNAP NAS Guide, things you can do with a nas, nas drive activities, nas drive for home, nas drive 2021, synology 2021, qnap 2021, cool things a nas can do, what can a nas do, what can you do with a nas, synology surveillance, qnap surveillance, Chia NAS, NAS Chia mining, nas chia plot, nas vms, how to use a vm on a nas, boinc nas, plex nas, plex media server, netflix nas

Id: QOl_nKInr_Q

Length: 16min 49sec (1009 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 01 2021