These offerings work well as a pure NAS - your data is backed up and available.
Where they fall down for me as a home user is in their inability to offer other services. For example, photo sharing. I have a fast home internet connection and all my photos are already on the NAS. But the photo sharing capabilities are very, very weak; so inevitably I have to use another service (ie Google Photos, Dropbox, Flickr) if I want to make those photos available to myself and others while away.
The same goes for other forms of media sharing, self-hosted email, etc.. The boxes offer these things - and the appeal is obvious to the end-user - but the potency is so weak as to be essentially unusable.
Where they fall down for me as a home user is in their inability to offer other services. For example, photo sharing. I have a fast home internet connection and all my photos are already on the NAS. But the photo sharing capabilities are very, very weak; so inevitably I have to use another service (ie Google Photos, Dropbox, Flickr) if I want to make those photos available to myself and others while away.
The same goes for other forms of media sharing, self-hosted email, etc.. The boxes offer these things - and the appeal is obvious to the end-user - but the potency is so weak as to be essentially unusable.