Very interesting topic…
I faced a similar issue a year back to find a solution that works for the whole family. Given the number of growing family devices and amount of data storage required all our MacOS systems ran out of disk space regularly.
Done plenty of research and discovered all the issues mentioned so far. I settled using the following stack:
- TrueNAS as my storage provider, no matter what you can have never enough. Currently running a tuned Electric Eel with Incus installed which serves all our applications
- SeaFile as cloud storage, didn’t choose NextCloud for various reasons.
- Mac systems have both Seafile clients installed for direct access and to sync important folders like Documents, DownLoads, etc.
It took a bit to figure out to get this all flying as you also need central authentication between all devices etc. but the result is pretty cool.
Important folders get automatically synced as soon as you have any kind of network access anywhere. It allows to sync the data between devices to work on an IMac at home and using your laptop remotely and you even can quickly access it through a browser.
To avoid running out of disk space a script is running periodically and moves old data into an non synced archive folder. Direct access is still possible through the Seafile apps.
Although Seafile comes with a small cost >3 user, it does a damn good job managing all our data. Family is happy and doesn’t complain anymore.
This is just one way how you can solve it without paying a lot of $$$ to any party. Since I setup this a few more possible solutions came along but haven’t had time to look into them.
Hope it helps or give an idea what is possible nowadays…