I have found synching to be very useful for making copies of files across devices. I have it setup to mirror photos from my phone, photos from my wife’s phone, and various other things (to-do lists for todo.txt, notes and shopping lists for obsidian… stuff like that) back to my desktop and my NAS. You can set it to do one-way sync (which is more like a backup) or two way sync (where changes anywhere are propagated to everywhere else).

As others have said, it’s not really a true backup solution, but handy to have immediately accessible copies of what’s on your phone in case of phone loss or damage.

For photo viewing and sharing, I am more or less pointing the photo sharing app on my NAS to the photos I sync from phone. They all get dropped into an “inbox” when first synced and then can be organized from there.

You may also want an actual backup solution. There are quite a few and that’s a different topic. The reason I bring it up, though, is that simply mirroring what’s currently on device is not considered a real backup by most people, and for good reason.

“Sorry, disc must be scratched”

Yes that’s a concern with all of them, Apple TV included.

That’s what I’m using now and I like it.

Not sure if it’s a factor for you but roku tries to phone home a lot more than anything else on my network (or perhaps my firewall just catches it more than other devices and apps). Otherwise roku is pretty good.

Nvidia shield tv is better though. It’s the best set top box. Made even better by replacing the default launcher/ home screen (android TV default launcher now has 2/3 or more of the screen taken up by ads or “recommended content” which is just ads).

Big.

Absolutely agree

Oisd.nl