 Tommy here from Orange Systems and let's talk about Synology backups. Is it a good solution? Is it the right solution for you? And well, not everything's a one-size-fit all. So I want to talk about Synology backup and what they have to offer, but what I'm hoping they do in the future and it's what they do right now is good. What they could be doing tomorrow, I think would be even better. And it's essentially offering, if you're an IT business owner who is like myself and manage many, many different companies, having one central dashboard to see all my different synologies across different companies in one dashboard. That's one feature I'm going to just start right off the rip that they're missing. That's the one part where what's missing from their backups. Other than that, if that's not a need or a use case you have and you're not in my position, maybe you're a home user, maybe you're an IT administrator or I guess for your home user, you're kind of your own IT administrator and you run a business and that business has a thousand computers and you're looking for a reasonable backup system. I think Synology is great. And this is something that Synology didn't pay me to say. This is something that we offer consulting on. This is officially, we are a Synology reseller, a Synology solution provider. So this is something we have experienced deploying out the field. By the way, if you want to hire us over to LawrenceSystems.com, there's a hires button at the top where we consult with all kinds of projects we've talked about on this channel. So technically I'm sponsoring a channel, not Synology, but back to the topic at hand. Does it work? Is it good? What can it do? That's what I wanted to talk about real quick. Now, I'll leave a link to some of the tutorials where I dive deeper into functionally how to do it. This is just kind of an overview of what they offer right here in November of 2021. And kind of my opinion still on yes, it's still a good backup solution that the videos I did a couple of years ago are still relevant. And I will be doing some newer videos in the future because I did those under ones on their previous versions of DSM. Now, Synology is up to DSM 7. And there's a few new things added, but the things it did previously are still there. Now let's start here with their active backup for business page. Manage your backup tasks for physical and virtual environments from a centralized dashboard to keep your data and services always available. PCs, physical service, file service, virtual machines, lots of different options. And of course, the one that gets people excited is this one here, unlimited backups, license free. And technically you're kind of buying a license because, well, you have to run the Synology software. So there's a license as in you get it, but there's not a recurring license fee. It's a upfront investment in purchasing Synology. You go over here to the very top of each of these pages that have a applied models. You pick out which model you want, figure out how much storage you need, and that's your limitation. How many systems can this particular model backup? Does it have the horsepower to do it? And then how much storage do you need to contain all those backups? And because Synology supports features such as deduplication with these backups, you can actually, if you're backing up, let's say a hundred Windows 10 machines and maybe five or six Windows servers of the same operating system, same era operating system like server 2019, there's a lot of deduplication that can occur to help reduce the amount of data you actually need. Synology does a really intelligent way of backing all these up and understanding the way the backups need to be done. It's a slick system. I like I said, I've covered it in reviews I've done where I get more technical about how it works. And it's a great way to back up all of your systems. They also offer active backup for Microsoft Office 365, same thing. They have the license free unlimited backups, all the details on there, very similar interface. They keep everything so it's easy to read. Once you understand where things are in it, it looks the same across their platform. And of course, the same thing with active backup for Google workspace. I've done a demo on the Office 365 one. I'll leave a link to that as well. The Google workspace one is a little bit more nuanced to set up. And it's because Google's got a very granular way you have to authorize and create the essentially series of authorizations to get the backup to work. They have a really detailed right up in Synology. I haven't done a video on that. It is a little bit more extensive setting up. It's not just dropping a count in and it backs it up. But it's actually just a way Google secures things and gives granular control over. But we've used this. We've worked with it. It works quite well. This is how we backup companies that need backup for their Google workspaces. Now, let's kind of break down though, looking at the Synology backup solution and how it actually works. So let's say you're on site and you have your Synology, you have it at your business location, you have the need to backup Office 365 or G Suite that backs up from the cloud over to Synology. That's great. And you have all your computer servers, file servers, you back those up all to your Synology that's on site. This is also a really common use case. We've had a lot of companies that go, you know, we just want to manage it ourselves where we work with internal IT teams. And this is a solid solution. You buy a pretty solid Synology, or in the case that you're going, you know what, this is a critical system, these backups. So let's go ahead and buy two Synologies. And I just recently did a Synology HA video. So you get a high end system, and then you buy another one and you set them up in HA mode. So all the backups are HA. Now you've got a very robust system for doing all of your onsite backups. Now, not part of active backup, but worth mentioning is Synology Photos. A lot of companies work a lot of individuals as well for privacy reasons, do not want all their photos that are taken with the phones to be put up in iCloud or put up in Google Photos or any of the other, you know, services offered, they may want them to be stored locally and manage them locally right out of Synology. That's another feature I mentioned and thought I threw on, everybody doing a lot of testing the Synology photo app with DSM7. And it's a pretty solid solution. As of right now, I don't have a video, but if you're watching the future, I will have a video on that topic. It'll be linked down below as well once it exists. Then we have Hyperbackup. Now Hyperbackup is just another feature of the Synology, and it's how we get data off the Synology and onto, well, another Synology, for example. We've had a couple of clients were very, we'll just call them cloud adverse, but they do have multiple locations that are geographically separate. So we set them up with a Synology at their main office and then a satellite office with another Synology. So we are replicating all the data from office A to office B. So they have their offsite backup taken care of with the Synology. No third parties involved, no recurring licensing fees other than, well, he's still going to buy internet. But still, this is a great solution and something easy to do with Synology. Hyperbackup also, no matter what the destination is, offers the support for encryption prior to sending. I will link to my video I've done on Hyperbackup. And Synology C2 is one of those destinations. It is a storage offering from Synology directly. Then we have S3 and many others. I bring up the many others because the Synology does support things like well, targeting an S3 bucket on a true NAS. I did a video on that as well. I can leave that link down below. So it all depends on how you want to do the backup. Synology does have a lot of solutions. So you're not dealing with some type of lock in of great, I got all the data on Synology. How do I replicate that offsite? Using all the different features that Synology offers makes Synology a really compelling backup solution. That only shortcoming is the one I mentioned in the beginning. And it's a big one is for people like me who, well, have lots of clients and each client has lots of computers and not having a central way to see into all of those systems. And some of you may mention going, well, isn't there the Synology CMS or Central Management System? Yeah, but that only gives me insight into whether or not the Synology is up and running and whether or not the services are up and running. It still doesn't give me that granular detail of, let's say you have five different sites, you have to monitor five different clients with five different Synologies and each one of those clients has a hundred computers. That's a lot of computers. That's 500 computers. I need to know the backup status and logging into five Synologies may sound reasonable, but we have a lot more than five clients. So it has a scalability problem. Unless you just want to put a lot of people and have them tasked with doing it. This is where there's still a shortcoming on there. But then they've got Synology active insight, which is a web console dashboard that lets me see all the Synologies, but it still doesn't have the feature yet that'll show me anything more than whether or not the services are up and running on those Synology. So it'll give me the status of the Synology, the status of the service on the Synology. But for example, at any particular site still doesn't give me the individual backup logs for all those computers that I need. Now I know I can have those emailed, but having even five Synologies email me the reports about all these computers would be tedious to go through. And it's not the same as having a dashboard where I can glance at it, figure out which ones of the systems aren't working and dive into it. So those shortcomings are real. And I think Synology is working towards a solution. I don't have any inside information other than, yes, I've directly talked to people at Synology and told them I would love to see that. And they said, you know, we'll see what we can do. You know, this answer you get from talking to marketing people, but I think it's something to really thinking about because they know people like me would love to sell more Synologies as a solution and settle on a singular solution for people who both are cloud adverse and want to do everything and keep it on their Synology or for a solution provider where people go, I just want you to back it up and ensure that it's backed up and me being able to offer that as a solution would be pretty cool. So I think the system's solid. I think it's a great platform for those of you that are individuals and it fits your use case. And if you need help consulting, you can hire us if you need to read through the documentation. Synology's done a great job of documentation. And I've also done a series of videos on how to set any of these systems up. It's actually something that I would say is relatively tricky for even a single home user. You don't have to be incredibly tech savvy to get it set up either. They don't require any command line configuration to get this going. The only one I mentioned was like G Suite can be a little bit tricky because of the API as you do. But once again, that's more of a Google and all the permissions that Google makes you go through to allow exporting of data for security reasons. It's just a little more granular than the Office 365 one. But either way, it's something that's pretty easy to tackle and well documented. So I'll leave links to those videos as I sit down below and let me know your thoughts on Synology active backup in the entire suite around it. Alright, thanks. And thank you for making it all the way to the end of this video. If you've enjoyed the content, please give us a thumbs up. If you would like to see more content from this channel, hit the subscribe button and the bell icon. 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