I bet the absolute number of laypeople using NAS is way up while the percentage of users is still tiny.
Backups being mainstream is awesome, but for them backup means cloud and almost certainly Apple/Google/Microsoft. Even I personally still use crashplan for actual backups primarily because it’s offsite and has unlimited version retention. I might roll my own one of these days though, whether finding some cheap cloud storage or putting a small server at my parents’ house or something like that.
It doesn’t have to specifically be a network drive, I bumped into this exact problem with the ntfs Windows drives I didn’t want to reformat after I switched. Only issue is fstab never worked after weeks of trial and error, so I had to use udisks and just elevate its permissions instead.
I haven’t dealt with it on network drives yet, but just recently I was redoing my main machine and had to decide how to mount some big spinning drives for storing media. The graphical disk manager included with Mint, which is just gnome-disks, made it pretty quick.
The average person does not mount network drives themselves.
I would hazard a guess that for the truly average user, booting to a desktop with Firefox and LibreOffice installed is like 90% of what they need.
NAS is incredibly common these days. Backing up data is mainstream now. Not 100% of laypeople use NAS, of course, but many.
I think both of our statements are correct.
I bet the absolute number of laypeople using NAS is way up while the percentage of users is still tiny.
Backups being mainstream is awesome, but for them backup means cloud and almost certainly Apple/Google/Microsoft. Even I personally still use crashplan for actual backups primarily because it’s offsite and has unlimited version retention. I might roll my own one of these days though, whether finding some cheap cloud storage or putting a small server at my parents’ house or something like that.
It doesn’t have to specifically be a network drive, I bumped into this exact problem with the ntfs Windows drives I didn’t want to reformat after I switched. Only issue is fstab never worked after weeks of trial and error, so I had to use udisks and just elevate its permissions instead.
I haven’t dealt with it on network drives yet, but just recently I was redoing my main machine and had to decide how to mount some big spinning drives for storing media. The graphical disk manager included with Mint, which is just gnome-disks, made it pretty quick.
I agree. It was a niche scenario.