A NAS survives a dead drive. It does nothing for a fire.
The best cloud to pair with or replace a NAS in 2026 is an off-site copy that leaves your house as ciphertext. Pick beebeeb for zero-knowledge encryption on every tier, IDrive to image whole machines under one plan, Backblaze B2 for cheap raw object storage your NAS syncs to. For most homelabs the honest answer is both a NAS and cloud.
A Synology or QNAP box is a genuinely good thing to own. RAID rides out a single dead disk, your data stays on the LAN, and you read it back at gigabit speed without paying per gigabyte. None of that is the problem. The problem is that the box sits in one room. A fire, a burst pipe upstairs, or a thief grabbing the obvious black box with blinking lights takes the array and every snapshot on it at once. RAID is not a backup. It is uptime for one narrow failure mode.
The 3-2-1 rule exists for exactly this: three copies, two kinds of media, one of them off-site. The NAS gives you the local copies. The cloud is the off-site one. The only real question is what that off-site copy looks like, and who can read it once it leaves your network.
What actually matters once the copy leaves your house
Off-site means you are trusting someone else's building and someone else's staff. Encryption is how you stop trusting the staff. The line that matters is where the keys live:
- Zero-knowledge (client-side): files are encrypted on your machine before upload, with a key the provider never holds. They store ciphertext. A subpoena or a breach of their database yields noise.
- Provider-managed keys: the provider encrypts "at rest" but holds the keys. Convenient — they can index, preview, reset your password — but they can read your files, and so can anyone who compels or breaches them.
"Encrypted" on a feature page is a marketing checkbox. The engineering commitment is whether the company can decrypt you. For an off-site copy of your whole digital life, that is the line to draw. beebeeb is built on the second answer being impossible: AES-256-GCM for file data, OPAQUE login backed by an Argon2id key-stretch (256 MiB memory cost) so your passphrase is expensive to brute-force, X25519 for sharing, keys zeroized from memory after use. You can read how the pieces fit on the security page. Your data is stored in Falkenstein, Germany as ciphertext, which means our own staff in the Netherlands cannot read it.
The shortlist for off-site NAS storage in 2026
| Provider | Zero-knowledge by default? | Capacity ceiling | Rough price | NAS fit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| beebeeb | Yes, every tier | 99 TB self-serve, quote beyond | €10.99/mo (1 TB) → €109.90/mo (10 TB) | CLI + WebDAV, scriptable |
| IDrive | Opt-in private key at signup; default is provider-managed | Tens of TB | ~$99.50/yr (5 TB) | Images NAS + multiple machines |
| Backblaze B2 | No (server-side keys) | Effectively unbounded | $6/TB/month | Native Hyper Backup / HBS target |
| Proton Drive | Yes | ~3 TB (Family) | Bundled with Proton plans | Web/desktop, no native NAS sync |
beebeeb — the zero-knowledge off-site layer
The pitch is narrow on purpose: an off-site copy that is unreadable to us by default, on every tier, no exceptions. There is no "turn on encryption" toggle that quietly disables half the product. Pricing is flat and per-account, not per-machine: Starter is €1.99/mo for 100 GB, Basic €3.99/mo for 200 GB, Pro €10.99/mo for 1 TB, scaling to 99 TB self-serve at +€10.99 per extra TB, custom quote beyond that — every plan opens with a 14-day free trial rather than a permanent free tier.
For a NAS user the practical hook is the CLI and WebDAV (served through the CLI). You point a cron job at a folder and encrypted uploads leave the building unattended. The product clients — web app, CLI, mobile, desktop, core — are open source, so the crypto is auditable rather than asserted; the server and this marketing site stay private, and we won't pretend otherwise. You get encrypted sharing with expiry, revoke and passphrase, file versioning (recent versions kept, retention configurable), file requests, 2FA, passkeys, and OPAQUE login. Recovery is a BIP39 phrase you hold; lose it and we genuinely cannot get your data back. An independent audit is planned and the findings will be published. The full list is on the features page.
The honest limits: native mobile and desktop apps are coming soon, not shipped — today the front door is the web app and the CLI. Google Drive and Dropbox import is coming soon too. And we will never read back at LAN speed. Your gigabit Ethernet beats any internet link. beebeeb is the off-site copy, not a replacement for the speed of a box in the next room.
IDrive — one plan to image whole machines
IDrive earns its spot for breadth. A single plan backs up multiple computers, external drives, and NAS units, including bare-metal disk images. Raw capacity is generous: roughly $99.50/year for 5 TB (often discounted for the first year), scaling into the tens of terabytes.
The catch is the encryption model. IDrive's zero-knowledge "private key" mode is opt-in at account creation; choose it and you hold the only key. The default account is provider-managed, so by default IDrive holds the keys. You can get true zero-knowledge from IDrive, but only if you choose the private key when you set the account up. There is no equivalent fork in the road with beebeeb: every account is zero-knowledge by default, and sharing still works.
Backblaze B2 — cheap raw storage, read the fine print on keys
Two products get confused here. Backblaze Personal Backup is "unlimited" for one computer at $99/year, but it is per-computer (a NAS isn't a "computer" that it backs up cleanly) and it is not zero-knowledge by default — Backblaze can hold your key unless you set a Private Encryption Key, and even then their server briefly handles it during web restores.
The real NAS fit is Backblaze B2: S3-compatible object storage at $6/TB/month ($0.006/GB), with free egress up to 3x your stored data. Synology Hyper Backup and QNAP HBS sync straight to it. It is cheap and it works. But B2 stores your data with server-side keys unless you bolt on client-side encryption yourself inside the backup tool. The encryption is your job, not the platform's.
Proton Drive — the closest peer, smaller ceiling
Credit where it is due. Proton matches us on what matters most: client-side end-to-end encryption and open-source clients. We don't claim an encryption edge over Proton, because there isn't one. The differences are at the edges. Proton's family storage tops out around 3 TB, tight for a homelab replacing a multi-bay NAS, and Proton is Swiss — though it has said it is moving much of its physical infrastructure out of Switzerland into the EU over legal-uncertainty concerns about proposed Swiss surveillance rules. If you already use Proton for mail and VPN, Drive is a reasonable off-site layer. If you need more headroom or want the data physically in the EU, that is where beebeeb's 99 TB self-serve ceiling and Falkenstein hosting come in.
Should I just use my NAS's built-in cloud sync?
You can. Synology's C2 cloud does offer real zero-knowledge encryption, so it is a legitimate option if you are all-in on Synology. The reason to put the off-site copy on a different vendor is failure independence. If one account, one vendor outage, or one compromised credential can wipe both your NAS and its cloud copy, you have duplicated a single point of failure rather than removed one. Mixed-vendor 3-2-1 is more resilient than one company holding all three copies, and a separate provider for the off-site copy is the entire point of "off-site."
What's the right setup for a homelab in 2026?
Keep the NAS. It is your fast, local, large working copy and your first line of restore. Add an encrypted off-site copy on a second vendor so a fire in one building can't erase everything. If you want that copy unreadable to the provider by default — no opt-in toggle, no day-one decision you can't undo, no sharing penalty for choosing privacy — that is the gap beebeeb is built for.