Synology BeeStation review: A great way to start getting real about backups
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raschumacher
Ars Praetorian
Tangentially: What do smart lazy people do for Windoze backups? Is there anything as comprehensive and effortless as Time Machine is for macOS?
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As someone who manages a large enterprise backup system for thousands of clients...
No.
Bare metal restores are fantastic where they are needed. They are absolute overkill for 99.999999% of consumers that just want their data safely stored off of their local machine.
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I didn't say "Don't Use RAID" I said "Don't User RAID 5/6" which is a meaningful distinction - you can still, afaik, use RAID 1 or 1+0, which is better for desktop users anyhow (see the PS I added to my previous comment).
However, I agree it's kind of ridiculous that they haven't fixed the Btrfs RAID 5/6 issue in like what 8 or 10 years?
I guess the question is, why did the Btrfs project lose steam when it was so close to being a complete solution? Why haven't Linux distros and/or corps like IBM, Google, MS, Amazon, etc contributed to completing the work on Btrfs? It's so tantalizingly close to being a great advanced FS, and has for about 10 years.
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Sure…at a lower rate….and I was not suggesting a single point of failure backup strategy…
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Yup. Any single backup can fail - even the online cloud Backup. Hence the 3-2-1 rule. Hopefully if the online backup gets lost, one of your local copies at least survives.
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If you really want to make it work - you can run a Windows VM and mount an NFS/SMB share as a local device using rclone (with a bit of clever configuration) to backup anything using their desktop backup service.
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For what it’s worth, I’ve been really happy with my two-bay Synology NAS running Tailscale. Lets me use it just like a cloud drive (have always-on VPN access via Tailscale to the drive, so it shows up in macOS as a networked drive without any work). I also have the Synology do nightly backups to Backblaze B2 to have a copy offsite.
It’s the best solution I’ve found to balancing ease-of-use with data security.
It’s the best solution I’ve found to balancing ease-of-use with data security.
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Agree. I found Tailscale remarkably easy to set up on my DS218+.
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This thing is a single external hard drive that also runs a web server. It's not appropriate for any kind of backup, if you actually care about retrieving the data intact. Data on spinning discs degrades over time. Error correction is not optional.
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I'm not really surprised the giants aren't interesting in btrfs. They scale way, way, way past where even complex volume management filesystems like btrfs and zfs make sense. They're well, well into distributed filesystems, to the point where they're often developing their own (e.g. Google).
There was some corporate support behind btrfs. Red Hat tried. They have since killed off that effort. If it can't be successful with Red Hat behind it, it probably isn't going to make it.
I'm not saying all RAID is broken in btrfs. But even though my setup in zfs is the equivalent of RAID 10, and should be safe in btrfs, that a core feature of the filesystem is so broken you can't trust it to safely store your files, when data integrity is one of the biggest selling points of a checksuming filesystem, means I have no interest in trusting 10s or 100s of TBs of data to it. That combined with the worse tooling (as you mentioned) means it's dead.
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I'm not sure what the advantage is here over just... getting a regular Synology NAS. DSM is pretty user friendly already. You can get a DS124 for $150 and as much storage as you feel like paying for. It's upgradable, and all the features will work much more smoothly with the additional RAM and faster processor.
Personally, I have a DS224 at home and a DS120J at a friend's house as a remote hypervault. The ability to automatically FTP directly from my mirrorless camera is hugely convenient, as well as keeping all our phones and computers backed up without having to pay for monthly storage.
Personally, I have a DS224 at home and a DS120J at a friend's house as a remote hypervault. The ability to automatically FTP directly from my mirrorless camera is hugely convenient, as well as keeping all our phones and computers backed up without having to pay for monthly storage.
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I have a Synology DS 1520+ with add on drive unit for a total of 100TB of RAIDED storage. Synology hardware is ok, the value is in the DSM OS.
Given the cost, I recommend buying a small Synology NAS. It allows transparent drive upgrades and has a superior feature set.
Given the cost, I recommend buying a small Synology NAS. It allows transparent drive upgrades and has a superior feature set.
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At a lower rate per drive? Probably. Lower rate per unit of storage? Maybe. Unless you're talking single digit TBs of data or you have deep pockets, you're going to be running more SSDs to make up the same amount of disk space as HDDs.
There's also the type of failures to consider. All my HDDs have given warning that they're failing and have provided time to mitigate the failure. Once a HDD starts complaining about bad sectors, it's time to swap in a replacement and get resilvering. That drive can likely still serve up data while that resilvering is going on, before your array becomes degraded. Just went through this myself a couple of weeks ago on my personal server. No big deal.
While I have had SSDs fail in a similar fashion where you get some heads up, they're also known to fail completely dead,usually due to a controller failure. You go from 100% "everything is fine" to 0% "that disk doesn't even exist anymore."
But mostly it's down to cost. Trust me, I'd go all flash if it was reasonably economical. But when you can get 18-20TB HDDs for $200-300 and SSDs are an order of magnitude or two more expensive, it's not viable for just simple, mass storage.
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Wait, you don't have ANY offsite backup? That seems risky. Even a NAS could be lost if you had a housefire, lightning strike, flood, tornado, big earthquake, etc.
For any unique/valuable files, it makes sense to pay for some offsite backup. Although, it has occurred to me before if you have family or friends who live in another region, where they are unlikely to be affected by the same natural disasters, now that 500Mbps+ internet speeds are becoming more common, it might make sense to do encrypted peer-to-peer offsite backups. Trade a few TB of space on your NAS with a friend or family member, and send backups to each other's NAS.
I used to do this with a couple backup tools that made it simple to backup to a friend/family member's computer, but both of them shut down eventually (or changed business models) - Cuckoo Backup was the first one - they got threatened by some patent troll and decided to shut down; the second was CrashPlan and they end-of-lifed their personal backup offerings and went SMB/Enterprise only.
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He literally just said he has a DS224 at home and a DS120J at a friend's house.
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Regarding using something proprietary, as ever there's shades of grey. Each to their own I say. Synology do a reasonably good job of allowing non-IT people to easily run their own data storage independent of the big tech companies, with some cloudy services of their own that are "neutral" (in that they're not tied to a particular phone, acknowledging that they are tied to Synology's own hardware).
In terms of being in control of all of one's data, it's not a bad option. It's proprietary, but at the same time they're not charging you money-or-else-your-data-evaporates (which is what the big tech companies are doing). It's good that in this day and age there's at least one company prepared to give the consumer that data "sovereignty" whilst offering something akin to what big tech wants to charge you $$ forever for.
Synology is effectively in the same market as DropBox, OneDrive, etc. It'd be interesting to compare the amount on online storage in actual use in terms of the number of Synology boxes vs the number of DropBox accounts.
I've not heard of Windows Storage Spaces. I've got lots of otherwise useless mixed sizes disks. My curiousity is piqued!
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I just use the built-in file history functionality, with the destination being a folder on my NAS.
One nice feature is that it’s reasonably easy to restore an older version through the “properties” menu.
YMMV, naturally.
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Well no - if you ever lose access to your account your data goes with it. The availability and access to your account is absolutely at the discretion of the provider. Your data has no more monetary value than what you paid for the service and often not even that.
I wouldn’t use any cloud solution without a local copy with a one-way only sync.
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The best way to use one of these for backup is to buy into it with a friend, and partition the drives between you, then set up an automatic block sync backup between the devices under encryption. This gives you the off-site backup automatically. I've been using this with Synology NAS for the past 10 years with great result, nearly effortless after the initial setup.
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"....my ideal backup system is just Btrfs or ZFS differential snapshot sends, with compression, allowing snapshot history to be retained, and also, allowing stuff like CoW file copies to be efficiently represented in the backup."
Good call on the ZFS/Btrfs snapshot solution. Pika for automated [and encrypted] Home back ups and Timeshift for the OS work for me. No money spent.
Good call on the ZFS/Btrfs snapshot solution. Pika for automated [and encrypted] Home back ups and Timeshift for the OS work for me. No money spent.
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I just can't trust Synology stuff. I've had a couple clients that had too many issues over the years with their Synology stuff and Synology's support was of little to no help. They've got neat stuff with great feature sets but their quality leaves something to be desired, IMO. Unless they've made significant changes in the last 5-ish years I just can't trust this sort of thing from them.
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Agreed. But I still don't get why portable hard drives are singled out as "not a real backup".
Once portable drives started hitting sufficient capacities for me (4 TB, to account for a full backup set plus file versioning going back at least a few months), I moved on from ugly, loud 3.5" HDD devices. If you need one, you need one -- but I didn't.
Now I have two 4 TB portable drives which I rotate back and forth between home and my offsite location. I do the swap 1x a month or so, and any gaps between would be quickly filled in with cloud service syncing. All data I own exists in a minumum of 3 places (iMac + 2 separate drives), plus an extra copy on iCloud. Using portable hard drives, but this all sounds like a real backup to me.
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So, the two machines (or more) synching the data, doesn’t qualify as a local copy? I need another device?
maybe I’m wrong here or maybe I just don’t think any of my data is that valuable…
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Claverhouse
Ars Centurion
All modern external drive solutions are black, with identical black wires; chunky; minimalistic; fugly to the max; and uninteresting.
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No, this is an industry mentality that sees tens of thousands of devices which is where you see the issues creep up. That's especially true with folks who keep all their hardware in the same place. RF interference is surprisingly common but most folks never know it happened because typically they resolve it by moving things around while troubleshooting. It usually manifests for end users as one of those weird issues they can't track down that went away all on its own. Saying you've never experienced it so it can't be an issue is a lot like someone saying they've never noticed they have malware on a Windows XP box they still use. Just because you haven't seen something in a relatively small sample size in no way implies that thing does not exist.
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If you're on a Mac, Carbon Copy Cloner now lets you configure your cloud storage accounts so that CCC can download and back up files that might not be downloaded onto the computer you're backing up. It's a one time purchase, not a subscription, and you can use it with whatever storage device you choose.
There's no Windows version of Carbon Copy Cloner, but maybe there's other software that does the same.
There's no Windows version of Carbon Copy Cloner, but maybe there's other software that does the same.
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Oh,the "remote hypervault" part - I guess that's synology's peer-to-peer backup feature? That didn't register at first, but re-reading it, that caught my eye.He literally just said he has a DS224 at home and a DS120J at a friend's house.
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While I know not everyone is a nerd, seeing products like this makes me so glad I found rclone. Not only can it backup everywhere, but also be used to serve files over the Web. Free, open source, and no proprietary BS thats destined to shutdown or end support in a few years. Cus ya know? Not profitable enough.
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Especially since SSDs writing data is inherently slightly destructive last I checked. Spinning drives have issues too, to be certain, but they're not guaranteed to eventually fail when used as intended.
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I think it's because folks assume that's the only backup. And for many home users, it is.
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IME, you're not wrong—I can't say I've ever had a 100% positive experience with Synology support, and it's generally because they are super cagey in what information they're willing to disclose to the user about what's going on under the hood. Even the support dumps you send them are encrypted.
Hasn't stopped me from owning a string of syno boxes for years, including my current one, because i just can't be arsed to build a standalone NAS myself, but I do wish their support sucked less.
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I wish nerds would stop trying to gate keep what IS and what ISN'T. So damn condescending. Not everyone can have a million backup copies of their files. ANY copy of your most important files that can be easily restored is a backup.
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There are three very different reasons for "backups." They are error recovery. ("Oops, I deleted that file, but I need it."), archival storage ("I don't want my tax return from 2011 on my hard drive, but I might need it some day.") and disaster recovery, also called business continuity ("Holy shirt! Burglars took my desktop, my laptop, and my cute little NAS.") One's backup strategy needs to consider all three of these uses. The 3-2-1 approach alone doesn't do that.
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I've now just gone and read up a bit on Storage Spaces. The tech came in for some criticism back when introduced in Windows 8. Much of the criticism seems to date to back then. but I see they made improvements in Windows 10 (e.g. adding a rebalancing / optimizing feature for use after adding new drives to pools).
I know what you mean about mid-sized stuff. The looks I get from the Cloud fans when I suggest that there's nothing more perfect for a particular job than a nice, simple, local array is hilarious (right up until their Internet connection dies).
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Hyper Backup is doing a good job for me. One thing I really like is that you can back up on to, well, anything, it can be encrypted, and you can get a Windows (or Linux?) app to access backups direct off that media. You don't need a Synology NAS to access one's backups.
Which is nigh on perfect for the home user who has actually done an offsite backup. House goes up in flames? You can get access to your data from the offsite backup so long as you have a PC to do it on. You don't have to go buy a Synology NAS first.
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