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With your feet on the ground or your head in the clouds?

In addition to image quality, a surveillance camera’s main focus is on the storage options for the one moment when an undesirable situation occurs. At this moment, we use the Foscam app and the free streaming possibilities that Foscam offers every user up to one year after purchase. With eight hours of history, this is more than enough to be able to look back at the images in the event of a burglary or vandalism and, if necessary, to take a snapshot for the law enforcers.

For most applications, the standard cloud service is sufficient, but after a year this offer is over, and some users will eventually run into the limits of the free cloud storage. Sometimes it is useful to be able to make a movie-clip or to be able to browse back over a longer period of time. In this respect, Foscam’s free service offers limited functionality and an additional subscription should be chosen, for which Foscam obviously charges a modest fee. So what is a sensible choice? Upgrading the cloud subscription or investing in a NAS? And if we choose the NAS, which one should it be?

Most NAS solutions have a complete library of applications that allow the NAS to be used as a web server, accounting package, media server or as a surveillance drive. Unfortunately, not every manufacturer has the same choice and not every application can be installed for free. Both Synology and QNAP have the best cards in this area at the time of writing, as well as for our purpose. Both manufacturers provide the surveillance software completely free of charge, and there are no restrictions in functionality. Exactly what we need.