As i recommended to parent, buy a synology. It does everything both of you are talking about. If you're only trying to sync between computers, just use CIFS - \\192.168.0.5\sharename\ - in windows right click "this PC" on the left in an explorer window and "Map Network Drive". For cellphones, there's "DS" apps for all the features that the webUI exposes - File browser, audio player, surveillance (NVR is built in, or was), video system similar to plex/netflix but called DS video. and that's all "out of the box" - there's several dozen "addons" that are click-to-install.
and look, i am sure qnap and Aghyzzicgh from aliexpress might do this too, but i can't speak to them. I bought a synology on recommendation from a friend. My first one got hit by lightning (yes) and i had to buy a new NAS but the drives still work. i've replaced the original drives, but they still work. i installed one in my kid's machine to hold games. My current synology is a 4-bay dualcore with 2GB of ram.
it works perfectly for all this stuff. my phone automatically backs up photos to it when i connect to wifi, for example. If you put your syno on a public IP, you can hotlink to content on it. there may be ACL shenanigans, i have no idea. I don't use it that way.
why don't i use my synology that way?
Because i run a public nextcloud instance to be able to synchronize my photos and documents and hotlink them.
derp https://nextcloud.projectftm.com/index.php/s/synoscreenshot
+1 synology has been a surprisingly competent docker home server. I decided I wasn't interested in any of the services that require an account with them and was pleasantly surprised everything works fine without signing into any synology services. I thought about building something but I wasn't confident in any of the free NAS OS's on offer. Synology has a nice interface for managing users, containers, and sends me drive health reports on its own email address via SMTP. Low drama environment.
I love Immich [0] for photos, Jellyfin [1] works great for music and movies, just spun up a memos container for notes. For documents and stuff I would use dropbox for I just FTP into with Cyberduck or Filezilla.
[0] https://immich.app/
[1] https://jellyfin.org/
[2] https://www.usememos.com/