Coming to live in China, trash your cloud services and get yourself a NAS!

When coming to live in China, you won’t be able to rely anymore on many Western services that were maybe essential to your workflow and daily life. It likely includes your cloud storage, streaming services, or even your emails and calendars. Services like Google, Dropbox, Proton Mail, Spotify, or Netflix are banned and not (easily) accessible. Equivalent available Chinese services exist, but are targeted to the Chinese market and often fully in Chinese. Yet, from this challenge, you are given the opportunity to take back the ownership of your data by self-hosting some of those services in a NAS.

In this post, I’ll show you how you can set up your own cloud storage in your new Chinese home with a NAS, and access it (securely) from anywhere in China as you would with Google Drive or Dropbox.

This post is targeted for people who are not already self-hosting enthusiasts, and with limited knowledge on the topic, but who need the comfort of a good and secure cloud storage without the hassle of spending hours installing and maintaining it. Note also that the solutions I am describing are not the most cost-effective, but the most plug-and-play and maintenance-free. With a little more knowledge and time involvement, one could build a system delivering the same services and more at a fraction of the price. I may cover in a follow-up blog post some more advanced setups.

Note that I will reference commercial products and services. I emphasize that I am not sponsored by any of them and I have not tried nor am I aware of all the different competing products.

Cloud services

Depending on your use cases and needs, cloud services might still be the way to go. Let’s list the pros and cons:

Competitive cost for low amount of storage (< 1TB).
BUT cost increases rapidly if storage needs are heavier.
Big cloud storage companies employ the best backup and data replication practices. Your important data is not gonna disappear into oblivion.
BUT they technically have access to anything you put on their servers, and have demonstrated in the past to disregard your privacy and use your data for commercial purposes and other activities…
Speed of data transfer is constant and reasonable, whether you’re at home or on the go.
BUT don’t expect to be able to stream 4K movies from anywhere…
Limited choices of cloud storage services in China. Most Western services are unavailable.

Let’s now consider two popular solutions for cloud storage services that you may consider in China.

Apple a safe haven (for now)

If you already rely on Apple iCloud for your cloud storage, and this is all you need, the good news is that it will still work relatively flawlessly in China. On the other hand, if you were contemplating the idea of switching to Apple products, it might be a good moment to do it. Obviously, one major downside is that you will be trapped in their ecosystem and miss the opportunity to learn how to self-host your data. Additionally, while prices are affordable for limited storage requirements, they can quickly go up to the roof if you need to store a few TBytes.

The mastodon Baidu cloud

I cannot not mention the Baidu Cloud service that many Chinese citizens rely on. I have not tried it myself, but I know that the prices are very affordable. However, the apps are entirely in Chinese with no possibility to switch to English. While it can be a great way to commit yourself to learn Chinese, it may also be an inconvenience you’d prefer to avoid.

The way of the selfhoster

While you might feel mortified by the impossibility to rely on your favourite cloud storage service, this is not the time to lose hope yet. There is a way out: the way of the self-hoster

What is self-hosting?

Self-hosting consists in running and managing your own digital applications and services on your own hardware and infrastructure. For instance, your NAS securely located in your home/apartment The infrastructure that runs your services, ranging from your network, IoT, computing hardware, and software, is called your homelab. Arguably, your future NAS is already a tiny homelab, and you, therefore, will be a self-hoster.

If you are new to self-hosting, you may be astonished by the range of services and digital tools available to you freely, and that have been crafted with love by passionate enthusiasts. I, myself, feel a mix of admiration, gratitude, and confusion towards these talented individuals pouring their free time into software development that barely makes them any money, and whose sole recognition is an endless flow of feature requests and a few GitHub stars.

To give you an idea of the range of things you can do, you could host your own Google Docs suite, Google Photos, orchestrate home automations, organize and share your ebooks, recipes, home finance, run your own private Netflix, and so much more. If you fall into the rabbit hole of self-hosting, the possibilities are almost endless! But we are not going on this adventure today. Perhaps, we will dive further into this topic in a follow-up blog post.

Make yourself a favor, get a NAS!

This post is all about converting fellow expats to use NAS solutions to replace their cloud storage in China.

But what exactly is a NAS?

NAS stands for Network-Attached Storage, and is essentially a dedicated computer that you use as a centralized storage for your files and backups. It is generally designed as a low-power machine running 24/7 with a set of built-in Drive Bays in which you insert your storage devices (hard disk drives and solid-state drives). NAS units, and the files they contain, are made to be accessible to all your devices at any time. You can, of course, invite your family members to enjoy the benefits of your NAS with their own devices.

The major NAS brands generally offer seamless integration with your computers, tablets, and smartphones, for offloading your files into the NAS and having them available across devices. Of course, those brands often go beyond just offering a “file storage” solution. Their software comes with many other services, such as calendars, media servers, or backup managers.

Here is a list of accessible major NAS brands in China:

Synology is arguably the biggest name in the NAS market! They offer the most comprehensive, secure, and beginner-friendly software. Yet, I must point out that Synology has been under a few controversies in recent years. The latest being enforcing the use of their brand-name hard drives as storage devices for their NAS. They have also been criticized for the disappointing hardware specs of their recent products compared with the competition. Despite these issues, if you are a total beginner looking for a plug-and-play/easy solution, I think Synology still has the edge.
QNAP is a brand that has been on the NAS market for a while, and is the historical alternative to Synology. QNAP also had its own set of controversies. The biggest so far being a massive security breach a few years ago. However, if you do not intend to expose your NAS on the internet, I would not worry too much. Their products have less neat software but better hardware than Synology.
Ugreen is a long-standing brand in electronic devices, but relatively new to the NAS market. As this is a reputable Chinese brand, you won’t have any problem finding and buying their products in mainland China.
Do-It-Yourself (DIY) NAS! A NAS is simply a computer with a load of storage and a specialized operating system. Building your NAS from an old computer for instance would probably be the most cost-effective solution. However, this is not the solution I would recommend for a beginner that wants a quick and flawless install.

Where do I get a NAS in China?

Now that you are convinced that you absolutely need a NAS, you’re left with the devouring question:

How do I get one of those devices in China?

To an extent, NAS are relatively “niche” products in the realm of general consumption. Thus, you will probably have a hard time finding physical boutiques or resellers in your local Chinese town. The best is certainly to order it online. You will find all the previously cited brands on Jing Dong or Tian Mao for instance; they are some of the biggest shopping internet platforms in mainland China. If you are not a veteran of Chinese online shopping and do not read Mandarin, I strongly advise not to buy from a reseller, but from the official NAS brand stores on these shopping platforms.

Note that the NAS enclosure and the storage devices are generally sold separately. For instance, if you buy a recent Synology NAS model, you will also need to buy a couple of Synology drives. If you buy your NAS from another brand, you have a wider choice of drives you may use. However, you should pay attention to pick NAS-friendly ones that are optimized and engineered to work in tandem with your NAS enclosure. Here are a few classic safe choices:

Seagate IronWolf hard drives.
Western Digital Red hard drives.
Toshiba N300 hard drives.

Access your files out of your home

As for standard cloud services, you may need to synchronize the files on your devices to your NAS from anywhere. Let’s assume your NAS is safely running from the comfort of your home. When your devices are also at home, on your home network, this is a piece of cake. Setting everything up is straightforward and uncomplicated. However, once you are outside your home, things can get tricky, and this is to be expected. Indeed, by default, your home network does not let outside devices in, and we want to keep it that way! However, it means that your computer at work cannot communicate directly with your NAS, which is safely hidden on your private home network.

But then, can you still access your NAS from outside?

The short answer is yes. There are plenty of solutions, each with varying levels of trickiness, security risks, and technical knowledge required from the NAS owner. You should also be aware that most solutions involve exposing your NAS to the outside world in some way. While my goal is not to feed your paranoia, you should keep in mind that it always comes with risks.

That being said, let’s review some of these solutions:

Perhaps, the most adapted solution to beginners is the QuickConnect service from Synology. This is easy to set up and “decently” secure. The video of SpaceRex provides you with a good summary of important security practices when using Quickconnect. Other NAS constructors have similar services. However, they may not have the same track record regarding security, so use it at your own risk.
I may also mention Cloudflare Tunnel and Tailscale, which are both popular and secure approaches to accessing your services at home. However, while not particularly impractical for novices, these solutions will definitely require a bit of learning.
Lastly, a very common solution consists of installing a VPN server in your home network to establish a secure, encrypted connection between your devices and your home. However, this solution may not be easily achievable for someone freshly arriving in China. It requires opening a port on your router, which is not an option accessible out of the box with certain (most?) Chinese ISP. You would need to contact your ISP and ask if opening a port is possible. You will need to explain your situation and request in Mandarin. Ultimately, your ISP will have the final say and may refuse.

Data redundancy and backups

Owning your data also means that it is your responsibility to guarantee its security and integrity. It is all the more important if your NAS hosts some of your and your family’s most important files. To hedge your system against catastrophic data loss, you should use two main classes of tools: data redundancy and backup.

As with any electronic device, your NAS enclosure and its drives will wear out over time. Don’t get me wrong, they will probably have an honorable life, but death comes after all of us, even your NAS… To be more specific, if your NAS runs long enough, you will face drive failures. In a dummy configuration, when a drive fails overnight, all the data it contains would be gone and unrecoverable. Fortunately, this is not how a NAS works. To protect your data, your NAS can employ various redundancy systems and technologies for fault tolerance. Depending on your NAS, you may have access to RAID (0, 1, 5, 6, 10), SHR, or Unraid single/dual parity. All of this can appear to be a little technical, so if you are a beginner, I would simply recommend using the default configuration proposed during the initialization of your NAS. However, you should understand that to make your system tolerant to drive failures, one or more of your drives will be dedicated to redundancy. Meaning that if you buy four 4TB hard drives, and want a system tolerant to a one-drive failure, one of these four drives must be dedicated to data redundancy. Therefore, with four 4TB hard drives, the effective storage capacity of your NAS will be 12TB instead of 16TB.

However, data redundancy does not protect you against accidental file deletion, data corruption, malware, or complete system destruction (e.g., fire, flood, or theft). This is why you need to protect your critical files with backups. Backups are point-in-time snapshots of your data that you may use to recover the state of your files and system configurations at a given time in the past. For the most important data that you cannot afford to lose, you should employ the so-called 3-2-1 backup strategy. It consists of keeping three different copies of this data on devices of different natures and locations. For instance, one copy on your computer, one copy on your NAS, and one copy on an external drive at your office, on a friend’s NAS, or on the cloud. Most NAS systems offer built-in backup software that can periodically copy and save your data at the location of your choosing; it significantly eases good backup practices.

Little recap and going further

Let’s have a little recap of the pros and cons of NAS devices in China:

An initial substantial investment to buy the NAS enclosure and storage devices.
BUT an investment that will quickly become cost-effective for high storage requirements.
The fastest way to access your data when at home.
BUT accessing your data securely from outside requires a little bit of research and a few tweaks.
High level of privacy. Nobody else owns your data!
Owning your data means that you are responsible for implementing the best data security and integrity practices. It will require time and learning.
Many of the most well-known NAS brands are available in China. You won’t have issues purchasing your device.

The objective of this blog is to provide you with a general understanding of what a NAS is and why you may want to have one when living in China. If you wish to take the leap, you can find further guidance on the installation and setup process from the YouTube channels: