Pi vs entry level NAS vs HP N40L

Hi all

First off, apologies for the question as I know there’s a million people asking similar things but I wanted to get my reasoning across to clarify what’s potentially the better option.

Currently my OneDrive is maxed and I pay for a family package with icloud. So I wanted a NAS to store all my photo’s from two camera’s and have OneDrive stop telling me that I’m at 95% capacity.

The age old question, for such a device do I build a budget Nas with a Pi 4 8gb or maybe a 5 and some cheaper HDD’s or invest in some specific Nas drives. Or get an entry level Synology which looks idiot proof but will cost £500 with HDDs.

Now at this moment I won’t be using it for a Plex Server or VMs as I have a NUC running HA and PiHole etc.

As I fear from losing images etc would a bought Nas with some sort of RAID config provide enough redundancy to not lose data

Thanks again all