How to use an external hard drive as my main storage device which I can access/sync to my laptop like Google Drive?

Question

I have a MacBook laptop which I use to work from home and at the office. The Mac has a 500 GB hard drive which is not enough. I currently use Google Drive (1 TB used) and an external hard drive at home (2 TB used) which I back up very intermittently (bad practice, I know...). Google Drive works well for me since most of the stuff on the hard drive is just backups and archived items. Everything on Google Drive is the stuff I use day-to-day.

My workplace has previously offered unlimited storage on Google Drive but that is being cancelled as of Dec 31, 2024. So I need to migrate everything on Google Drive somewhere else. I feel like it would be logical to migrate it to my external hard drive to consolidate everything in one place. But I want to be able to access my hard drive from anywhere and sync it with my Mac in a similar fashion as Google Drive. In particular, I want the functionality of having a "local" copy on my Mac which doesn't require network access, as well as a "cloud" copy on the external hard drive which regularly gets synced with the Mac copy.

What is the best way to do this?

I have found lots of tech websites and blogs explaining various options, and it seems like there's lot of ways to do it but its often unclear what exactly is necessary and a lot of tech-speak. I need it in plain English as I am not particularly tech-savvy in this regard.

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

I would recomend finding an unused computer you may have lying around, or purchasing a cheap computer online, installing a Linux distro (I would recomend Linux Mint or another Ubuntu derivative, Fedora is also a good option), and installing Nextcloud. Plugin your external harddrive and set it up to be automatically mounted into Nextclouds storage directory.

This will give you a setup on your local network that is similar to Google Drive, but which can be extended with Nextcloud apps if choose. If you want to make it accessible outside your network via port forwarding in your router (which may not be an option in all situations), or by using a VPN solution like tailscale.

Instead on Nextcloud, you can also build a nas using either NFS or SAMBA, however this can be more complicated then using Nextcloud, and less flexible.

Both solutions (Nextcloud and NAS) are somewhat complicated (Nextxloud has multiple layers of installation that make it slightly challenging), and both require working in the command line. Of course, there are other ways to do what you need which may be easier or harder.