There is probably still a bunch of old people with a dialup subscription that they never canceled.

I think tailscale would fit your use case perfectly.

You can install tailscale on your computer and your NAS. This way, there is a tunnel between your computer and your NAS. In practice you will have a separate IP address for your NAS that you can use from your computer.

It also means that you will have secure access to your NAS from wherever in the world as long as you have internet access.

Then, Mullvad and tailscale are integrated together. It means that from tailscale you get the Mullvad add-on that allows you to use Mullvad as exit-point. Meaning that all your traffic that is not in your tailscale network will go through Mullvad (so in your case everything except your NAS)

It’s been two years that I am using that and it’s working great for me.

How old was your kid at the time ? You are giving us hope, we need to know!

Unless you have a debit card from a third world country bank and half of the time for online payment the authorization fail.

I’ve been in this situation several times and then though I don’t like it Paypal has often been the only payment option available to me.

It’s really that valuable, the bulk prices I’ve found on Alibaba are around $25-$30 per KILOMETER!