I don’t know that spending 2k on a NAS is going to do me any good as the NAS is not a replacement for backups.

This is very true but a NAS still has its place. Using RAID-1 (simple mirroring) protects against any potential catastrophic failure of hardware but does nothing to protect you from a ransomware attack or stupidly deleting the wrong folders. So there is a point to having a NAS but it’s not 100% solution on its own.

Relying on cloud storage for backup has its own set of problems. Cost of service, extra charges for retrieving your data when needed, and the extreme time it takes to transfer anything. Depending on the volume of data, it could take weeks to download everything back to your location. Add to that the loss of privacy and the potential for any given provider to go out of business or change their business model with total disregard for their customers and it’s not really the best backup solution.

IMHO the way around these limitations is to have a NAS with RAID-1 (for problem set #1) and set up a second NAS either on site or remote and send periodic backups to it using whatever intervals make sense for your case. I do this with my Synology NAS as my primary and an older Terramaster NAS that receives the backups via Rsync. I have total control over what gets backed up and when, and in the event of a total loss of the primary NAS the other one is still available to rebuild from.

we store our data at one master GDrive and share the files to each employee

I’ve been an IT guy (professionally) for over 35 years. If this is your major use case, why complicate things by self hosting anything?

Get rid of your (presumably Windoze) laptops and replace them with Chromebooks. Capital cost of equipment is much lower (due to no MS licensing and lower hardware demands), no constant updates, no antivirus required, and best of all, if things get messed up it takes literally one minute to reset back to factory defaults (powerwash) and another few minutes after login you will have a completely restored to normal laptop. Even if you guy a new one, all settings get transferred from the cloud upon first login, within minutes, and it looks and acts exactly as before. If no reset is required and all you need to do is a little hand holding, the Chrome Remote Desktop allows you to do so by remote control, even from a Windoze machine. This is why they are so great for tech-challenged people, seniors, kids who like to mess with things, and probably for your business. All you would need if you don’t already have it, is a separate Google account per user. Best to assign these rather than have them use their personal account. Then share your GDrive to all users. Since everything is stored and done in the cloud they should have no problems searching for things. They will also have access to the full suite of Google office apps and 15GB of ‘personal’ cloud storage per account in addition to your shared file store.

I switched to PIA very recently after my Nord subscription ended. Also Nord doesn’t support port forwarding and I wanted to improve my seeding. But PIA has been a disappointment. Using their app on my Win11 desktop, I often see messages on Reddit and elsewhere that I’ve never seen before about “no internet”. It also seems like responses are delayed and sometimes my screen just remains blank after clicking on a link. I’ve never experienced any of that before switching to PIA. And perhaps the biggest gripe, I intended to use PIA with Wireguard on my NAS but after much searching, I cannot find anywhere that PIA releases their WG keys. So I can use WG on my Win11 app but not on the NAS. Oh, and port forwarding? Yeah, apparently that has to be ‘renewed’ periodically so that too, is a PITA on the NAS. Luckily I’m still within the 30 day refund window, just have to figure out where to go next. Maybe AirVPN. In fact, that would be a no-brainer for me except for one thing – Air doesn’t have a server in Mexico and I do need that occasionally. PIA has one that’s incredibly slow but at least they have one.