The others' points are valid. Google Drive is rather expensive, Hetzner is cheaper and works well enough.

However, it also depends on how you use that data. In my case, I'm a Sunday photographer, so I tend to wrangle multiple GB of data at a time. I usually edit my photos locally, but I sometimes will want to revisit older stuff. I can download it, but it's a PITA and s_l_o_w. Google drive file stream is terrible for this, you never know if the files are uplaoded or not. Onedrive isn't any better. I haven't tried dropbox.

Hetzner has some storage box which exposes SMB but doesn't seem to enforce encryption nor IP filtering, so I'm not very comfortable with that.

Also, my internet connection pretends I have 5 Gb down, 0.5 up. The down part is usually as expected (my machine only has a 1 Gb nic), but upload is sometimes very slow. Running a local NAS is much faster. It's ZFS, so backups are trivial to send to encrypted offsite storage.

It also doesn't need to run 24/7, which helps with power usage (0.22 €/kWh here).

> I'll just add, as you grow older, you come to realize that time is a finite resource, and while money may seem like it is finite, you can always make more money.

Indeed. Waiting around for files to transfer gets old quick. I have better things to do with my time. My NAS needs a whopping five minutes of my time every now and again when a new kernel comes out.