Synology sure provides an expensive but complete package for home office and enthusiasts.
Just buy it and be done with it. It's certainly more expensive than DIY it yourself using off the shelf components and things bought out of online classifieds. But for most people that have no interest in tinkering or don't know what to do, just paying the price of a complete solution might be worth it.
I'm not so sure anymore. My synology is now on its third backup application, so doing recovery means you have to hunt down the old client first.
The last one seems to be in Javascript. It's slower than the previous one, eats more RAM and has a few strange bugs. Backing up my smartphone photos is not always reliable.
I used to be happy about them, but since my update to 7, I don't feel I trust my backups anymore. Maybe I have to byte the bullet and do some rsync based scripting instead.
Totally. If you enjoy the config and have the time, by all means.
If you just want it to work, by a Synology. Mine has been running strong for several years now and has docker images for my unify controller, pi hole and Plex. Took minimal time to setup and none since that day. Love it
Edit:
And my encrypted cloud backup in Backblaze B2 was equally as easy to setup and costs a whopping $2 a month for every family pic, video and doc.
I have triple backup, with mirrored RAID for one of those. No effort, maximum peace of mind.
Redundancy and backup are not the same thing. RAID gets you redundancy but if you get pwnd, you get redundantly pwnd!
So you backup to elsewhere. Now you have two copies of your data. Cool. Now you probably can recover from a silly mistake from up to a week ago or whatever your retention period is. However, if you don't monitor your backups, you'll never notice certain snags such as ransomware. OK, that might be low risk for your home backups.
It's quite hard to get the balance right but I think that you might not be quite as protected as you think you are. Why not buy a cheap hard disk and clone all your data to it every three or six months and stash it somewhere?
I have a similar argument with a colleague of mine, to the point that I will probably buy a LTO multi head unit myself and some tapes.
RAID is not a backup, its a data integrity thing. It ensures that what you save now stays saved correctly into the future. It protects now. Backups protect the past.
Think long and hard about what might go wrong and take suitable steps. For you I think a simple, regular off line back up will work out quite well with minimal cost, for disaster recovery.
I didn’t actually specify it out, but my third backup is an offline SSD that I plug in every once in a while and store at my office. I only mentioned the RAID for local redundancy reasons.
You are right about the data being corrupted, either maliciously or bitrot. The NAS is not accessible outside my home network, so I think I am ok there.
Bitrot would require snapshots and full backups stored over time, which I could do fairly easily but I am currently not.
My Synology DS918+ ran for years without an issue.
Then suddenly I woke up and I had the blinking blue light of death, it starts but won't boot. It could be anything from the BIOS battery going dead to parts not being soldered properly.
The only way I could get data off their proprietary SHR system (which is great, except when the HW breaks) would've been to buy a new Synology system, put the drives there and pray it works out of the box.
At that point I decided to move out of a NAS appliance and build one myself, based on Unraid. Now I've got the same 1 drive redundancy BUT every file exists on exactly one drive, that drive has a bog-standard XFS filesystem. So if the HW breaks I can just take the drive(s) out and use them in a cheap USB dock.
The Synology's issue turned out to be a bad PSU - the light turned on but for some reason it didn't provide enough power for the system to POST. I grabbed a 3rd party one off Amazon and now it's running offsite backups for the Unraid system :)
> The only way I could get data off their proprietary SHR system (which is great, except when the HW breaks) would've been to buy a new Synology system, put the drives there and pray it works out of the box.
++1 for synology. I've been running their 5-bay model for a few years without any issues. It just works. I have it paired with a synology router which also just works. They both do their jobs transparently enough that I can basically forget they exist.
I don’t like that symbology provides ridiculously small amount of ram - I had one 7 years ago and it had 512 mb of ram, and was chugging. Looking at their website, they still sell a version with 512 mb. That’s a total joke in this day and age.
That being said, there are plenty of companies providing NAS drives at lower price points, with various levels of quality. Generally, they are not worse than a random AMR SBC with a closed source kernel, just like the author here assebled.
I appreciate not everyone wants a mini pc they have to manage, I had a nice setup but now it has died and I can’t find time to deal with it
I had a (dis)pleasure of running multiple Synology units in a business setting. They do die out on you like everything else if not more frequent, the QC is generally non-existent.
Synology's biggest reliability issue was when they used the Intel Atom C2000 CPUs. Designs with those CPUs have a 100% failure rate on the longer term (not just Synology, everything with it, Cisco was hit hard too). There's a workaround by soldering on some resistors to pull up some marginal line that will fix dead units.
Look, I'm sorry, but you literally asked for this:
Hello, I'm from the Department of Redundancy Department with a citation for a "Do It Yourself it yourself". Please pay the fine in internet chuckles, thank you.
Just buy it and be done with it. It's certainly more expensive than DIY it yourself using off the shelf components and things bought out of online classifieds. But for most people that have no interest in tinkering or don't know what to do, just paying the price of a complete solution might be worth it.