One post tagged with "egos"

Why Egos

December 30, 2025 · 2 min read

A Independent developer

A few months ago, I dropped my phone into a river while fishing.

It died instantly.

What hurt wasn’t the phone — it was the data. Photos, videos… all gone. No backup.

So I did what many people here probably did: I bought a UGREEN NAS and told myself:

“I’ll never lose data again.”

But after a few months, I noticed something weird.

I only have ~40GB of photos and videos. I don’t run Plex. I don’t watch movies on TV. I don’t need a 24/7 home server.

And yet… I now own one.

In the end, my NAS became… a very expensive photo backup box that I use maybe once a quarter but running 24 hours every day.

I went deeper into the self-hosted world:

As a developer, I expected this to be easy.

It wasn’t.

Config files, services, ports, permissions, LAN limit…

Everything feels like it’s built for sysadmins, not normal users.

Even for me, it was tiring.

So I asked myself a simple question:

What do I actually need?

Just:

A way to not lose files A way to move files between devices easily

So I built a small tool for myself.

It’s basically a minimal personal file system with a different approach:

it works like this:

Need a file from device A → download it directly, Want to send something → upload it to A target folder

That’s it.

I’ve been using it for half a year, and honestly:

It replaced my NAS for 90% of what I actually do.

I’m curious how others feel:

Do you actually use your NAS daily? Or is it mostly just sitting there? Was it worth the complexity?

If anyone here had the same frustration with overcomplicated self-hosted tools, I made this project public:

Would genuinely love feedback — especially from people in this sub. Not trying to replace NAS for power users, just exploring a simpler option.