I think I was in a similar situation as you - after having a kid my already dwindling time and appetite to play with backups waned even further. I ended up buy

I think I was in a similar situation as you - after having a kid my already dwindling time and appetite to play with backups waned even further. I ended up buying a Synology DS418j NAS a couple years ago and it's been adequate. I wouldn't quite rave about it, but I also haven't experienced anything better. I've thrown tens of thousands of photos at it, and my only complaint there is the background processing to generate thumbnails is very slow, especially with "Live Photos" from iPhones (which are essentially photos with short videos attached). If I upload a couple thousand of those, the NAS might not finish generating the thumbnails for over day, so if you browse using the apps Synology provides for photos, you just see lots of placeholders for a while. I did have a (SeaGate IronWolf) disk fail on me already, and the NAS did it's thing correctly - it made audible beeping alerts (which were definitely attention getting as the NAS had never played a sound prior to that). When I swapped in a new disk I was easily able to instruct the NAS to add it to the RAID array and recover, and everything was back to healthy pretty quickly. If I were to shop for a replacement I'd be tempted to look for something with a beefier CPU as the thumbnail generation thing is occasionally annoying. But honestly the CPU is mostly idle most of the time, so if I did get a more powerful NAS the CPU would probably be idle 99.9% of the time instead of 99% of the time.