Synology Active Backup Review: Is It The Solution For You?

[@EZGG-k5h]

We are using and recommending Synology a lot for small companies. One of the best features is whole PC backup and restore with Synology, it is super easy and effective

[@quikmcw]

How do you provide Draas with Synology?

[@tsharpton1]

What synology app should I use to backup my pc's at work (remote pc's ) when my synology NAS sits at my house off site.

[@noggan]

Thanks for your video Tom. My use case: I needed to fix a backup for work. I bought 4 different NAS devices from Synology. All of them were the + models (which is required to get the ABB Software and other premium apps). We store stuff on Two of the NAS-systems (primary NAS devices) and during off hours I also have backups running on both of them. And then the other two NAS devices they are backing up the two primary NAS devices. The only thing left to solve really is offsite or cloud backup. I haven't decided if we should go cloud or host it ourselves yet. We have multiple office site locations. So I'm thinking of buying another NAS and putting that in one of the other offices. It can take care of backups and other things in the future as well. I kind of like the idea of spending money once. That is the great thing with synology. I don't really care if they cost 20% more than the competition. The competition don't have all those awesome business apps.

[@menash41]

I generally don’t backup individual workstations. We just backup customer servers. I was the one asking in the forum about moving to synology from Solarwinds backup which is costing a fortune.

[@derhein]

Thanks for the great content. I am personally also really loving Active Backup for Business for my home and university group backup solution. It mostly works flawless. Question at Tom (if you read this): In the ~ 2-3 years running ABB at home and at the university with ~15 clients, I regularly have issues with some machines (always the same ones) starting to transfer the entire system drive and not using VSS. These machines usually have long uptimes (weeks to months). Usually this can be fixed by rebooting and restarting the VSS service in Windows. However, sometimes it goes unnoticed for days leading to TB unneccessary traffic. There also seems to be no way to notify based on increase backup traffic in ABB which would help fix these systems quicker. Have you encountered this & maybe found a workaround?

[@dezman2003]

Why would you not just create a simple batch file and windows task to restart the VSS service automatically everyday?

[@notreallyme425]

I wish there was a way to backup a computer using Active BU that can encrypt the backup so the admin account can’t see the backup. Use case: my brothers and other family members could backup to my NAS (I have plenty of disk space) without them worrying about me snooping through their files.

[@DangoNetwork]

Synology is design for sys admin. So sys admin already have access to all the system they manage. Also, even if there is encryption option. The software still have to decrypt on the storage side to verify the back up. In your use case. You can create another DSM VM within your Synology and give your brother access to that.

[@notreallyme425]

@@DangoNetwork that’s a good idea (VM), thanks for the suggestion! I’m a home user and a tinkerer, so I like using more “pro” gear like this. I’m that small niche consumer who wants pro level features in a home environment, but I also don’t want or need a server rack in my basement either.

[@luckbeforeleap]

Hey Tom, would love to see a video on how you ensure that your offsite backups are immutable (so that ransomware that toasts the source data cannot reach across to the online backup and toast that too).

[@LAWRENCESYSTEMS]

Separate credentials for every device is the solution

[@luckbeforeleap]

@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS Thanks Tom. Was more thinking about if the device that writes to the online-offsite back-up is pwned (so that ransomware gains write access to that device too)

[@LAWRENCESYSTEMS]

​@@luckbeforeleap That is why you keep revisions or shut down the backup system when you know you are pwned.

[@nandurx]

any plan to make truenas to synology back up? easy to use?

[@LAWRENCESYSTEMS]

It's not really that simple

[@akurenda1985]

One major drawback is you have to sync the entire activebackup folder that holds the compressed data for hyper backup. I can't just select critical VM's or be granular at all ;(.

[@msbilbrough]

Great video, thanks for sharing. Would be interested if you could do a similar/comparison video of other comparable backup solutions (e.g. Veeam) please?

[@LAWRENCESYSTEMS]

I don't use Veam and don't really have a need for it so not likely to happen anytime soon.

[@msbilbrough]

@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS noted thanks.

[@Klementoso]

You shouldn’t use Hyper Backup for backing up your Active Backup for Business folders. Even though they all support deduplication, Hyper Backup can’t do that well for Active Backup for Business backups so your backups will explode in size on the second NAS. You should use Snapshot replication for that. The downside is that both your NAS devices need to support BTRFS to be compatible with that package. You should, however, use Snapshot Replication for everything except User home folders, configuration and applications. SR simply can’t do configuration and application backup. And because it can’t backup the configuration, all folders would lose ownership and privilege settings. Hyper backup is great for these scenario’s, but it’s also very slow to restore from backup (can take many hours for just a TB of data). Snapshot replication is way faster and it’s even possible to failover to the second NAS, though that may not be the best idea when the second NAS is not on the same site, due to bandwidth limitations.

[@DaveShrivastav]

Great video. I’m a MSP owner and partner with Datto for BDR but have a client that doesn’t want monthly fees for BDR. So I’m proposing two Synologys in two different locations to get 3-2-1. What rack Synology would you recommend?

[@LAWRENCESYSTEMS]

You choose the model Synology based on how many system there are to back up.

[@minifig404]

Active Backup seems great.... if you run Windows/Mac clients.... I know this video wasn't about HyperBackup per se, but my frustration with it is the data format seems to be one big file. Snapshot Replication seems less flexible/harder to use, but at least then the multiple revisions can't get corrupted by encrypting the file, as you presumably could do with HyperBackup....

[@LAWRENCESYSTEMS]

Hyperbackup does not just create one big file.

[@minifig404]

@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS Really? I'll have to take another look.

[@giancarlomurtaza6450]

I like Active Backup, my only issue is you cant backup to an encrypted partition.

[@tombruton]

You can :)

[@giancarlomurtaza6450]

@@tombruton the only I thing I have seen is encrypting the data in transit. Have not seen anything about data at rest with Active backup. Can you link an article?

[@tombruton]

@@giancarlomurtaza6450 you just encrypt the volume. If you restart the unit you have to manually remount entering the password for the volume

[@christopherwilms]

Worked great for my Ubuntu desktop until the kernel went above 5.4, which active backup doesn’t support

[@DangoNetwork]

They finally allow you to acccess the backup files from other synology now.

[@michaelrousseau4373]

Can I use this to backup a fresh install of my kids pc in a perfect working condition and easy restore it back to that state when they mess them up lol

[@tplacky]

Hey Tom, great video and very insightful. We have a VMware environment with around 50vms and a couple of physical servers to backup approx 12TB (windows server with a few linux). We're toying with the idea of synology backups vs Veeam with a NAS as a repository. How do you feel this would compare as a solution? Having played about a little bit personally I was swaying towards Veeam mainly due to the immutable feature Any thoughs? Cheers Tom

[@LAWRENCESYSTEMS]

Never used Veam so I don't really have an opinion on it.

[@AMPTechGrade]

This is cool but any Active backup solutions for Unraid??

[@LAWRENCESYSTEMS]

I don't know, I don't use Unraid.

[@oleksandrlytvyn532]

Thanks

[@bluesquadron593]

That cup was annoying 😳

[@LAWRENCESYSTEMS]

Yeah, I noticed the ☕ after I published.... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[@bluesquadron593]

@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS no biggie