Well thanks. As the name implies I'm a rookie at setting up my NAS and servers and routers and everything. I work from home as a freelance mechanical engineer, and I plan on using my DS918+ to store both business and personal data. My incredibly slow internet connection drove me to look for a large and redundant onsite storage option instead of using cloud storage. Eventually I hope to set up another NAS as an offsite backup, but that's going to have to wait until they connect fiber optic to my house.
So far I've been very surprised by all the different things a NAS can do, but I've also been disappointed in Synology's setup instructions. There doesn't seem to be a good instructional on how to set up a NAS from beginning to end, and they have so many different instructionals for all the different things that it can do (including multiple options that can do the same thing) that it is very hard for a newbie to figure out which way is the best route. I'm afraid I won't be able to contribute much to the discussions, but I look forward to learning more about what this thing can do.