Your NAS isn't just for Plex—here's 4 other services you should try

Many people buy a NAS with a single goal in mind: building a private Plex media server for all their movies and TV shows. But Plex itself requires surprisingly few resources to run, meaning the processor and RAM in your NAS can spend most of their time sitting around, doing basically nothing.

So, why not put all that idle hardware to work by self-hosting some new apps that you'll quickly grow to love? As great as Plex is, there’s a whole world of useful self-hosted services that you can run on a low-power NAS. It won't take too long to realize just how much you were missing out on once you try them.

Put your media library management on autopilot with the *arr stack

Your NAS should do the busywork

Generally speaking, Plex does a pretty decent job of managing your library. It scans your folders, identifies movies and shows, fetches the correct metadata and artwork, and even gives you the option to automatically create collections for box sets and sequels.

However, Plex's library management features are strictly on the media-server level. It can scan the files you point it to and identify them, and while it presents them in an organized interface, Plex doesn't actually manage the files themselves.

For that, you need the so-called *arr stack, a set of apps that automate media file organization and renaming. Sonarr is for TV shows, Radarr is for movies, Lidarr is for music, Bazarr manages subtitles, and Prowlarr is an indexer manager that lets you integrate and synchronize indexers across the rest of the *arr stack.

These apps work at the file level, which makes them so useful for a media server. For instance, when you rip a movie, the file might end up looking something like Spider.Man.No.Way.Home.2021.2160p.x265.mkv.

Radarr can automatically rename it to something like Spider-Man No Way Home (2021)/Spider-Man No Way Home (2021) - 2160p.mkv and move it to the correct folder on your NAS, keeping your library consistently organized.

You don't technically need the *arr stack for a media server, but it can save you a lot of repetitive file-management work in the long run.

These apps can take some time to set up, but once everything is configured, they do most of the heavy lifting for you.

Replace your cloud photo subscription with Immich

Keep your photos close to home

Broadly speaking, there are two common reasons people buy a NAS: to build a Plex server, or to keep a local backup of their photos and files. As far as photos are concerned, few apps make automatic backups as easy as Immich. The app looks and feels surprisingly similar to Google Photos, so if you're an Android user, you'll feel right at home.

Immich gives you one of the easiest ways to keep a centralized backup of all the photos your family takes.

The mobile app can automatically back up new photos and videos from your phone to your NAS, while Immich neatly organizes everything into a beautifully presented timeline. With its storage templates, it can also organize the underlying files into a tidy folder structure. It even packs AI-powered features such as facial recognition and image search that can run on your own hardware.

Replacing a subscription-based cloud service with something you host yourself can seem intimidating at first, but there are ways to make it more resilient. A RAID configuration can help protect against a drive failure, while keeping a separate backup of your Immich library and database in another physical location protects against catastrophic events like floods and fires.

Level up your smart home automations with Home Assistant

Make your smart home smarter

I was initially skeptical about trying Home Assistant, as Google Home was able to achieve almost everything I wanted. However, as my smart home network of devices from a wide range of brands grew, things became more complicated to automate, especially given Google Home's relatively bare-bones automation system.

After realizing that I could run Home Assistant on my low-power NAS, my whole smart home transformed.

It's the smart home tinker's dream app: if you can imagine an automation, there's almost certainly a way to make it work with Home Assistant. You can turn lights on and off based on the time of day, device activity, sensors, or whatever else you want. For instance, I automated all the lights in my home with NFC tags, and that's only scratching the surface of what the app can do.

Manage your network and block trackers across your entire LAN with AdGuard Home

Put your NAS in charge of your network

A DNS sinkhole like AdGuard Home is essentially a self-hosted DNS server that filters DNS requests across your network. You can set up custom filters to block intrusive ads, trackers, malware, phishing, telemetry from smart home devices, and plenty of other unwanted domains.

You can also use it to monitor DNS activity and control which domains your devices can access. It gives you surprisingly granular control over your network that even high-end routers would envy, and it can all run on your NAS while barely using any processing power. Your NAS is a great device to run it on because it's designed to stay on 24/7 while sipping power.

In some cases, it can even improve web browsing performance. I discovered that my web browsing experience got considerably faster after I offloaded DNS resolution to my NAS, as my budget Wi-Fi 7 router was struggling with all the other work it already had to handle.

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You can run plenty of surprisingly useful little services, too

I've only highlighted a few of my favorite, must-have self-hosted services here; there's a near-endless sea of useful apps you can run on your NAS alongside Plex. Just to name a few, Uptime Kuma is a service monitoring tool, Paperless-ngx organizes and OCRs your documents to make them easy to find, and Vaultwarden stores your passwords and works with Bitwarden.

Whichever apps you decide to run, I strongly recommend keeping them all in Docker, as it makes your apps much easier to manage down the road. So, go ahead and start exploring your NAS's true capabilities.