 Time here for more systems. We're going to talk about Synology. Now, Synology is something we've been deploying for a while. I really like their distation manager software. Their hardware is actually proven to be very reliable as well. So what we're going to do is to talk about some of the business use cases where we deploy these for our clients, some of the problems that they solve, and kind of the ecosystem of Synology including, you know, which options are available for them, and some of the great tools that we really like that Synology includes with their distation manager. So before we jump into all that, if you could hit that like button and let's first, if you'd like to learn more about me and my company head over to laurancesystems.com. If you'd like to hire a short project, there's a hires button right at the top. If you'd like to help keep this channel sponsor-free and thank you to everyone who already has, there is a join button here for YouTube and a Patreon page. Your support is greatly appreciated. If you're looking for deals or discounts on products and services we offer on this channel, check out the affiliate links down below. They're in the description of all of our videos, including a link to our shirt store. We have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and new designs come out. Well, randomly. So check back frequently. And finally our forums, forums.laurancesystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics you've seen on this channel. Now back to our content. And we're going to start right here with the Synology power brick. There's probably someone left a comment before getting this far in the video in all caps or even a link to Gamer's Nexus, who in 2018 did do a video that discussed the fact that their Synology had failed. And a NAS failing based on a power supply problem is a real concern. I completely would agree. And since then, Synology on all the ones we have deployed has always had external power bricks, with the exception of some of the rack-mounted ones. But like these smaller ones come with a power brick, we've had no problems with these. I believe there may have been an issue because I've seen people commenting about this from several years ago. And Synology listened to the audience and people on there complaining about the problem. They were aware of it. They saw the problem. And I am unaware of any current issues to Synology regarding them. And we've been deploying Synology for quite a while. Actually started probably around 2018. We started putting a lot more of these in clients 2019, a lot of them, and even more in 2020 here. And we've had none of these power brick failures. But failed concern. I'm at least going to address that. I know that was a problem in the past and the problem going forward doesn't seem to be an issue. And I recently reviewed this Synology with the HA option, which has removable power supplies. And that one seems quite reliable as well. Second, and this is a really valid concern as well. And I was confused on this until I did a little further reading to make sure I understood how what was implemented. And this is the RAID versus ButterFS. Now, ButterFS is not as popular as some of the other file systems, but does have a lot of great features of a modern, you know, journaling file system. So we can do RAID. We can do snapshots. And it's great, except people will tell you it's not stable. And they're right and wrong, depending on the context of the question. So in the context of if you were letting ButterFS handle the disk RAID, yes, there are some stability issues, which is exactly the discussion they have here. And I'll leave a link to this is right from Synology. That's why Synology said, no, we don't let ButterFS handle the disk. They're handling it inside. There's Linux at the core of these Synologies. They're handling it separately and ButterFS on top. So ButterFS, you get the journaling and the snapshotting benefits without having to deal with the problems you may have if it handled the RAID. So they have a separate RAID manager to handle the disk and then ButterFS on top. So failed concerns. And hopefully that addresses them and gives you an understanding of Synology and where they may have been before and where they are right now. That's always an important piece of context on there. All right, now let's go and start picking and selecting the NAS itself. Something I like that Synology's done is made the NAS selector. And you can just start and say, I'm a home user or small office or I'm a business or enterprise. We'll start with business or enterprise. And we can just start checking all the things only once we pick three at a time. So data backup storage for virtualization, file server. Yeah, those are good ones. Or let's say collaboration. That's another option because the disk station manager software has some good collaboration tools on here. So we'll go with these ones right here. We'll go file server, data backup, storage. All right, next. How many people? More than 200. Yeah, probably only 20 to 100. We're talking a lot of small businesses here. How many concurrent users? Fewer than that concurrently. So let's go down IOPS, regular. You can kind of see they'll drill this really down. Let's start over and go something simple because we don't go through every option on here. I'll leave that for you to choose. But this is actually a nice thing. They make this part a lot easier to say, hey, maybe I'm just a home user and I want a productivity or multimedia hub. Those are important like you want to run Plex. And you can also do the same thing. Do you need image recognition and to automatically organize your photos? That seems like a cool feature. There's only a couple of people at my house, one to 10 or one to five next. And now we have a couple options presented to us. So they give you a couple of different ways that you can go through there and pick out what you want. If you have an unlimited budget, just pick the highest end one that will do everything. But if you don't, well, they have some things that you don't have to overbuy. But it is important to try to buy up to what you're looking for in terms of power and performance. Now, this is kind of scroll through the product line here. As you can see, they have quite a few different machines. The two that we're looking at it kind of on each end of the scale is this is the DS220 Plus, which I believe is the replacement for the one next to me right here, which is the 218 Plus. This is a little bit older of a model, but works perfectly great for all the testing that we're going to be doing with it. And the other one we have in here, which is in the other room because it's noisy is the SA3200D. And the nice thing about this is both of these, and we'll pull them up over right here, are running the Synology Distation Manager software. So it's one and the same in terms of looks. Well, we've actually changed the theme a little bit on this one. So it looks slightly different. So our little two shuttle bay as we named it right here is running the same software and has the same package manager, has the same package manager on both of these. I really like this concept because it's nice as the SA3200 is, you still need a backup just because it's got RAID, just because it has redundant controllers doesn't mean something terrible couldn't happen. So what we did here, and this is we're going to start covering some of the software shortly is set up this as a destination with a pair of drives in there. So you can actually put a couple large mirrored hard drives, so certainly not for performance, but you got to put the data somewhere. And you can then buy and we'll cover how the setup works on that. A really inexpensive backup Synology to your much more expensive higher end Synology and replicate all the data between them. So you have a nice solid backup that you can go back to and restore. It may not be the fastest, but important part is that, you know, if there's a major failure, you have a way to back it up and we'll jump into that here in a second. But once you've gone through all the options on Synology and pick the right one for you based on the software and features, whether you have a very specific need like this active backup for business, the butter FS file. So I think all of them have that on their snapshot replication or the high availability options they have where we can narrow it down further like the virtual machine manager, you can kind of see they really have a lot to fit with the small business, the home user, and even some of the larger markets that, you know, may need file service storage for virtual machines. Now that one other thing of note they do have is expansion modules for these. So some of these you can buy some of the rack mounted ones can be bought as a head end unit and then you can then expand out a couple more units on it. And I covered that when I talked about the high availability one that we reviewed and I'll leave a link to that video as well. So you have that other option of not just getting the number of drives that will fit in that chassis, but buying a couple more chassis to expand it out further and have one act as a head unit. So they give you a lot of variety of options in hardware. And like I said, we've been really happy overall with the reliability of it. Now let's get to the good part, the software and what makes Synology so great of a system to deploy, especially for small businesses. We'll go ahead and start right here. Easy to use and built for everyone. This station manager or DSM for short is an intuitive web based operating system for every Synology NAS designed to help you manage with your digital assets across home and office. And it's really a slick system I will admit. Now the first question that comes up a lot because I talk about a lot of open source things, although it is built on Linux, Synology to station manager itself. Yes, I know there's projects to make this happen, but it is not designed just for you to load and roll it and build it on your own hardware. So it is specifically designed as a package system for the Synologies. And it does have a lot of open source things included and a lot of other things that Synology includes, such as your active backup for business G Suite active backup for Office 365 and a lot of other great features in here. We're going to cover the more common ones, but I'll leave a link here to see the entire list of software on here. And it's pretty exhaustive. They do a great job of having a lot of options and a lot of diversity that they offer with their systems. And let's look at the distation manager itself. Now how this gets loaded on Synology, you pop a couple of drives in, you open up your, you know, Synology IP address after you get it on your network, and it loads this automatically. It loads up the Synology distation manager and let's close all these crazy windows I have open and essentially start from the beginning. So when you log into this the first time you're presented with, you have the control panel, you have the little resource monitor over here. And I kind of like, even though this is all a web interface, the operating system like feel that you get of this, like the whole user interface experience you have is really nice with Synology distation. Now this is on the SA3200 and this one over here is the smaller, the one sitting next to me, the 218 plus. And they still are reasonably fast to open up functions, change things around, go in here and change like, well, let's say the network setting privileges for the portals, et cetera, et cetera. It's all relatively easy to go through and just check boxes. And I find it pretty intuitive for the control panel, but there is a lot here. So there's a learning curve, but don't worry, you can click the question mark, and they have the entire DSM help built in. So it'll walk you through each thing, connectivity of file sharing, setting up or creating a shared folder. And it's not taking you to an external website, they just included all of this built right in, even how to do the ACLs and permissions, et cetera. And this is the nice thing about Synology Submarine Listation is they really try to make it so you don't have to be super technical to get it going. So reasonably easy to use is how I would say this is as long as you know what you're looking for and what you want. Now the package manager, of course, is where all the fun is at. So once you've got the general settings done and how you want things to be set up and configured, and you can back it up here and back up the config settings, et cetera, and do the updates. The updates are really easy to do. You're just going to go ahead and choose an update time. As a matter of fact, while we're waiting, we'll go over to this one. And I want to show you how the updates work. I left these not installed on this 218. We'll just hit update all. That's really it. It's going to go ahead and update these. So you can even choose auto update. So we'll just say update automatically, hit OK. It's already kicked off on these ones here. And we'll let that run in the background and do its thing. So as these packages get new versions, you can tell them to auto update or you can update them yourselves. And it really is as easy as clicking update. What about installing packages? Well, they've done a good job of making that easy as well. So we'll let this right here, which the 218 is not really that fast. So it is pulling a little bit more CPU, as you can see in the resource monitor. But yep, that said, it's done. And let's do something like install the active backup on here. So we'll go ahead and set the active backup for business up. It'll go ahead and download, go through the complete install, and it will prompt you to essentially activate it in a second. So it's going to go through the install process. And we click open. We click activate. Agree to some terms and conditions. Log in with your Synology account. Package activated. And away you go, you have active backup for business all set up and ready to go. Now active backup for business is one of the first ones I'm going to talk about. It's a great solution for even if you're running this at home, you have a few PCs you want to backup. You want to back up the files on them and nobody backs up. So you should always set something that does automatic backups where you load a utility under computer and back it up for them because users will just keep using and go, I'll back that up later. I'll press that backup button later. This is something I've dove into on my channel here already. I'll leave a link to this. The active backup for business is a fully automated. You can set it up and have it automatically continuously on a schedule, at least back up the entire contents of a PC of a server of another virtual machine and store them all here on Synology. You can even create user interactive portals so the user without interacting with you can go to the Synology and restore their files and restore points in time to those systems. And of course, now you're protecting those systems from catastrophic failure. So if there were a large failure of that particular machine, you could go back and I've covered this in the video and completely bare metal restore from the backups that this creates both incremental and full backups. So the active backup for business, definitely a great feature on the Synology. We're going to switch over to this Synology and show some of the other cool things that we have on here that are, you know, things we definitely like to deploy depending on the use case for a lot of our small businesses. If you've done any work in business, compliance is a word you probably have heard quite a bit and we have the active backup for G Suite and we're going to go over here and we have the active backup for Office 365. Now the active backup for Office 365, I've actually got configured in here. So we're going to go ahead and launch the portal for it and show you what it looks like. But it's a similar one for the active backup for G Suite. I just don't have that one configured right now. And I don't have a video to link to. I'm working on a demo video of this. Now we'll go here and choose the role. We'll choose Hans, the demo user we have set up and we can look at the Office 365 file system backups that it does. Now just because you put everything in the cloud doesn't necessarily mean it's backed up. What if someone got a hold of your account and then started purging things? Or you have a rogue user who may be purged emails and inadvertently did this, whether it was malicious or not. If those emails are gone, the cloud necessarily doesn't necessarily a backup. And this is where Synology has a solution for that compliance, where we have to be compliant and make sure we have archived copies of your emails. You can do that on the Synology system. So you connect it to an account, individual email accounts, groups of email accounts, and you set it on a schedule to back up those email accounts. Like I said, I've got a demo coming on this, but I'll give you a preview here of how that looks. So right here is the inbox as it looks today. And we're going to just jump around here. And we can slide this over, choose a different date. And we've jumped right here to 820. And we see there's actually quite a few emails in here that aren't in there when we switch it back to today. So what if we want to restore those emails? Well, you can. You can just go here, check the ones. We can export them. We can restore the entire folder, just click restore. And it'll push those back out to the account. We have a local copy here. So while many people are talking about putting everything in the cloud, you can actually now, since it's not on site, you can use on site as a backup to the cloud. So you have more than one copy. And Synology makes that pretty easy to do. And especially for people who have a lot of email and a lot of data to back up, it can be expensive by buying another cloud service to back up your main cloud service when you can just get a Synology and back it up there. And then you can back up to Synology sometimes for the price of what it would cost you to have a second cloud service to back up. It also, and I'll mention this, has the ability just to export them right from here, both the files and the emails. And because I have .eml associated with just opening up as a text file, it does allow me to open it up here. But of course, I could import this into some other utility, but you can get those out. And the same thing with doing the calendar, contact and drive backups, I can go in here, expand this out and get a specific file I may want out of here. So if I wanted to download this right here, we'll go ahead and export it. And I was going to download right to my local system here is I need that file. And even if they've deleted it in there, once again, I have timelines to see what their file system look like at any given moment. So that's a really cool application that they have in there. Now in terms of file synchronization, we'll close this one here. We have, get too many windows open, the Synology Drive Admin Council for the Synology Drive Sync. Now I like how they call the drive because we have one drive, we have Google Drive and now we have Synology Drive. What they're doing is creating a system that can compete with them where you load a file synchronization utility on your Windows computer and then synchronize it with your Synology Drive. So you have files in here that are synced between the different PCs and the Synology being the central sync point for those files. So that is another kind of neat utility on there. We don't use it that often, but it is a nice option for people who want file synchronization utilities to be able on there. Now the hyper backup is cool. But of course, if you're storing everything on here, we would want to replicate this to yet another Synology, right? Well, they built that in there as well. So let's look at the hyper backup. And we can see we have this backup job I call back that NAS up. And we can say back up now. So let's back up any changes that may be on this system. And what we're doing is we're backing up to this 918. So the 3200 is in the other room that we're logged into and showing you on the screen. And then this is the 218. That's the destination for it. And this is a really nice compatibility feature of Synology, even though we have the nice high end, no expensive model Synology, we want to back up everything on there. We can create a backup job. And we'll go ahead and do this to add a backup. What do we want to back it up to a remote NAS device next, you enter the IP address, and I entered the IP address of this 218 sitting next to me, you put the username and password in. And that's it. It starts running the backups. There's really not much else to it. So actually, I'll walk you through it real quick. So we'll go here, data, Synology, next. And if you hit the little poll down, it searches the local network and can find it for you. Username is LTS, password. We're going to just copy it out of Bitwarden over here. So you go here, copy password, paste. It can look up YouTube demo, next. Pick what you want to back up. Just check the box, do everything. Next. Yep. Back up all those applications, send that data over there. Back this NAS up to there we go. Apply, just let it do the backup. You can choose rotation settings on there. They've made it really, really easy to take two Synologies, have one as a destination, and one as a source. We'll say, yes, we're going to let it back up and let it do this in the background. So we can have this job at running at one schedule, this job running in our schedule. And of course, you can do this in reverse. You can take the two Synologies and maybe they're both, you know, you have a client with more than one remote site and they want their remote sites to be their offsite backup. Synology has got you covered on that. They'll let you pick those as destinations back and forth. So another feature I really like is this hyper backup. And if you didn't notice, if I scroll down a little further, it does have the ability to choose Amazon Drive, Dropbox, HDrive, JD, Cloud, Microsoft Azure, IBM SoftLayer, Google Drive, and S3 Storage, which is different than Amazon because it can do S3 specific URLs. And I've never used this, but apparently it has S3 China in there. That's kind of interesting. So if you'd like to send your data to China, or maybe for compliance reasons, you can't let your data leave China. That is an option that they have in here, which is pretty slick. All right, onto a couple more features. Now I didn't dwell on this, but maybe I should at least bring it up. Yes, this is a full-blown NAS file server. So this will do Windows share emulation. So you can create folders and shares and everything else. That is completely a native, not application, but a native system that is built into this. It also, and I covered this in my other video when I reviewed the SA3200. Yes, it does both iSCSI, it does NFS shares. So all the other general NAS expected behaviors, I don't want to leave you assuming they're in there, but I will assure you, yes, they are in there so you can set all those up, including managing users, managing permissions, and creating user sets. Also, and this is another question that's come up quite a bit, is can I replace Active Directory? And actually you can. They have the directory server built in. So let's say you have a need for Active Directory because you need some central user management to manage all those permissions and certain domain policies and, you know, you minimum password complexity, etc. Well, that's a feature you can do. Now this is all emulated because it's built on Linux. They run Samba and Samba has the ability to act as a Windows domain controller and without a Microsoft server in between. So this does have that option. So you can set up user, computers, domain policies. To an extent, it's not going to be as full-featured as a full-blown Microsoft server. But if you're looking for a solution in between for maybe a small office with a few people, this is that solution that works out rather well that you can just drop in. So you combine that with the file server dimension where you control the permissions, you have the central user management, you can have these systems joining this as a domain. That's another feature that's built in to this analogy system there. And those are some of the most common ways we install it. Now I'm going to say we use the domain auth one extremely rare because pretty much most of the people, this is complementary or they just need file server access in there. So complementary to an existing Windows controller, which it can be integrated with, or they just need some basic, you know, small offices with a couple of lawyers offices seem to have a lot of these and a couple of design offices we do that we put these in where they go, you know, we're not worried. We only have like three people. You can set the permission for those three people in the office. We just need a common shared place to store all of our data, like our design files, our legal documents, and then of course have an encrypted backup that goes off site. So we have redundancy on those, or in the case of synchronization, so they can synchronize them. So when they come and, you know, load them on your laptop wherever they're traveling to and set up a, you know, remote sync option to this right here, the Synology. And once again, when you start syncing large files and you go, maybe I don't want to pay for all that storage in one of the other commercial storage providers, but those are some of the solutions on there. Most commonly, of course, it's just basically being a NAS for small business. The last thing I'm going to cover is surveillance station. This is another really popular use case for Synology, but as I stated in the beginning, when you're selecting out your NAS, you have to have something powerful off to run this. And especially with when it comes to IP cameras, having data retention on 4k cameras is doable and possible, but you have to scale out a machine that can handle the amount of days you need to hold on to that data. That being said, if you have a bunch of cameras, a bunch of 4k cameras, you also have to take into consideration that you probably don't want to use the Synology NAS for both surveillance station under a really heavy load and at the same time trying to use it for all of your users to actively back up their PCs while at the same time trying to do all the file sharing, there are some limitations. But one of the upsides of this, let's say you have a large file server that you built that is for the other four mentioned uses, so you're using as a file server and you go, you know, I'd like all my data not just to be on a raid that's on my Synology surveillance station, but backed up nightly to another NAS that's within the same building. I say within the same building because getting this much data off site can be challenging, especially with the, you know, modern 4k cameras. But if you're backing up motion only, okay, maybe that's a solution. Either way, Synology does have options for that where you can take and set this up and create redundant Synologies for your destination because maybe you really want to hold on to the data on some type of schedule for compliance or whatever your reasons are for wanting to hold that data. Sometimes, especially warehousing companies we've set these up at, they've really got some compliance things where stuff sits in your warehouse for X amount of days. They want to at least hold the footage for the amount of days based on how long that sits in there. And in some places, when it comes to commercial shipping and export import companies, there are a lot of laws around that they have to hold that data so they have to be able to track that information. Now, I'm not going to dive deep into Synology set it to many times. Synology surveillance station because the video I have on it goes a lot more in depth and it has a wide variety of camera support and it's a great system. We do deploy a lot of that and it's nice because they do have a couple add-ons including so you can display on a TV and NASA's dedicated towards setting up some knowledge surveillance station like as a dedicated box including with HDMI ports on there. So they sell special versions of their Synology that still runs the destination manager but also has the added option of that. So that's kind of my review of the NAS system. Like I said, it's been great. We've found them very reliable. We found them to fit a lot of these small businesses. It fits into a good solution for them that's very affordable, that's been very reliable and kind of easy to deploy. And having some of those tools especially like local onsite for people to have backups of their local workstations and being able to go to restore portal because I know everyone should be saving things on a NAS but especially when you deal with and we have a lot of clients that work specifically in the design field. Once their computers are set up, they're set up and they're looking for a way to back up all that configuration and full image and like I said, that Synology backup active backup which I have a video on can do full bare metal restores and it's not just about sure we have backups of the data but you know long it takes to set up a design system and all the different CAD systems and load all the details in it and get it configured the way you want it. I don't know myself but I know from designers they tell me it takes a really long time and having a full image backup on a regular even multiple times a day is possible with Synology and have it all local local and onsite so like I said it's a good solution for that. Alright and thanks I'll leave questions comments below and head over to the forums and thank you for making it to the end of the video. 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