 A lot of small businesses are looking for solutions to their backup strategy. An active backup suite from Synology is something we've deployed in some small businesses that want to manage their own backups and not be tied to monthly fees. We do offer full service managed backups, but for some companies, if they have internal technical teams and they go, you know, we just need something, a box here that we can back it up and then we can back that box up externally, Synology makes a good solution for that. And their active backup suite is really nice and I've done a lot of testing with it. We've deployed this for some clients and I kind of want to give an overview of how it works. And you know, I'll spare you all the marketing details here and talk about its functional side. Active backup suite does support full windows backup, VMware backup, file server backup. And interestingly as well, if you want complete copies of your Office 365 and G Suite, it's got an option for that too if you want to back those up. So this is clever that they can do all of it. So you can now have and retain all of your data internally on a Synology box. And obviously some people are going to mention, but then you're creating a single point of failure. Yeah, but you can back up the Synology box to places like Backblaze or even keep a second Synology box and synchronize it to it, et cetera, et cetera. We're going to focus today on just the active backup and how that works with some Windows machines and one file server. So this is what the dashboard looks like. Basically you just load this on the Synology from the app panel that they have. And here is a PC physical server. I don't have virtual machines in here because it only supports VMware and I'm not a VMware person, but it's in there. So how many way to do testing with it? And then file server. Now the file server is kind of interesting because when you add a file server, SMB or our sync server is the two types supported. So it's actually I connected to our free NAS and told it to back up a very specific folder. And this is kind of slick. You can just say, hey, back up this current existing other box via there. You just put it in credentials and it does it and it works. Like I said, fine with that. Now you when you're setting these up, you can set up as a task as a task list as a, to type a backup you want, which I have it set to be incremental. And we edit it and you can schedule it, run these days, run daily, run hourly. And this is important. And I say that very much so because you want one notifications whether or not the backup is successful or not to backup just once a day isn't always enough for clients when you think about how much data you create through the day. So having an incremental hourly backup of two servers there helps protect you from potential oops after you spent half a day working. So having this set up on an easy incremental schedule that'll get done really fast is really a nice feature that this has, especially because you can point it to other file servers that aren't even Synology. In this case, I pointed it actually at our free NAS box. So simple enough to create the task, create the portal for that. Now this is where I think it really shines is how it does bare metal PC backups. Now both of these are bare metal backups. The difference is if you call it a physical server versus a PC is when you're loading the tool and that you load them the same way you add the device the same way you go to add device, this little window pops up. You can create customized templates for it or you can just click here, download the installer next. And yes, it's really quick to get installed. Nothing, nothing really exciting to show there. But when you do a physical server, it adds a couple options to the restore. So I can do a full VM restore or instant restore to VMware. And a full VM restore, it has an option to instantly store to a Synology virtual machine manager. Synology we have probably is not going to run Windows 10 all that great. But you can set up the virtual machine manager on Synology and take and spin up one of these servers and have a failover set up on there. So if you have a fast enough Synology to handle the tasks of your server, this is the feature on the physical server side that gets there. When you just do a standard PC backup, and this is on the installer to ask you, do you want to do it as a physical server or as a PC? There's no other difference besides, I can tell, besides the fact that it gives that VM restore. So if you don't need the VM restore, you just, away you go here. Now the one problem I have in the restore, and I'll cover this briefly here, it's not rocket science to figure out, but I think they made it way harder than they should have. Create recovery media, brings you to a PDF. Then in a PDF, you go through and how to create the recovery media. It then has more links to go download things and load on a Windows 10 computer. And it covers it in detail, but to me, this just seems overly difficult to. Then yes, it does. It eventually creates an entire image. It's just so many steps, and it's not too hard to do. And it does create the image. And I did create an image and save it to the desktop of a Windows 10 computer. But I thought this was weird because I was hoping for just an ISO download here. I don't know if there's some weird licensing problem that's analogy had, but if they're watching this video, if you could make that a little bit simpler. And also, by the way, do this ahead of time. Have an ISO ready if you want to do a bare metal restore. And I'll show you how the bare metal restore works. But creating an ISO, it was not hard. It was next and yes a lot. There's more instructions there for making very custom ISOs with drivers. That's what the extra instructions were. But having to download extra software, load it, configure it, set it up, and then run the little wizard to create an ISO file seems a bit overkill. And it's a generic ISO that boots essentially in Windows 10. Like I said, we'll cover that when we get to restore portion. So here's the dashboards where you can see all the different things you're backing up and how things are going. But let's, we've tested the restores, we've tested this, but I want to walk through exactly how that works. How the restore statuses, activities. Let's go over here to a PC, for example. Now, here is the PC. We're going to go ahead and task list. Look at this computer. We'll go to the details of the last restore. Here's the log. I did one today, 426-920. And it took about eight minutes to back up 1.6 gigs. Now, this is, let me go, there's the other one here. Should pull up the log for this one. On 4.4, there was four gigs to back up. That's actually, I loaded the restore tool. 20 gigs here was the initial backup. It's not, it's just a base windows install. You can go through, there's a whole history. There's detailed logs and everything else. Now, let's talk a little bit about restoring this, because, like I said, it's pretty straightforward how to get the backup set up and going on here. And then you can look at the details and you can have all your machines listed here. And by the way, when it puts these in, it just uses whatever the desktop name is. And the type is bare metal. Like I said, that's the default template it comes with. And I recommend it, because it does bare metal, but then everything after that is automatically incremental to it. So, let's look. This is that desktop. This is the restore portal. Now, when you go here, there's two options. You have active business backup for business and active backup business portal. And it just launches a portal. You can see it's like a different window so I can just look at the recovery. I really like the way they laid this out. So, here's all the files that are on here based on this date showing here at the bottom. But what if I wanted to go back to a previous version of that file? And we can look at it from here. So, we just use this little timeline feature and it just lets us jump back to the different dates. So, this is 323. And if we go to users, and you know, go to LTS and desktop, I'm missing the ISO on there. So, let's now, same location, forward it up. This is the Synology restore media and other shortcuts changed. So, I kind of like how you can go right to the folder I want and then just use this back and forth to jump between older versions. You can select a different date. You can just hit this for now. So, it's got some options on the bottom that make it really easy. But it really quick, if I wanna delete or restore something, or I'm saying restore something that was deleted, it's not a problem. Also, the part I really like as well. So, let's go over here to our Windows 10. And this is what it looks like running. This is the Synology active backup that I opened up the window for, but it's quiet running in the background. So, from a user standpoint, it's no big deal. Like there's not, they don't have to interact or see much. And of course, what do the users want? They want their files back. Let's go ahead and go here. We're gonna go ahead and delete something. I made this folder open. It has an open VPN file in it for tests I grabbed. So, here's the 42619. Oops, I deleted it. So, you know, you get the usual phone call and the user wants their file back. But we have our, we'll go to today's restores. I did that backup today. So, I have that file and we're gonna go to Users, LTS, and there's that file right there. So, we're gonna go ahead and click on this. Select Restore. We're not gonna change destination. So, it's gonna be in the same place it was. So, we go right here, hit okay. Starting restore process. Active backup, actually my head's in the way. It had a little notes that popped up here to let me know. Restore process has been completed. We go over here, we didn't do anything here and it's back, just like that. It's really nice that you can do that. So, you can look at any of the PCs, figure out what the user deleted, or it works the same way as a file server. So, let's kind of go over to the file server and take a look at that. So, here's a couple of video files I have in here. I'll proposal offer, a Synology test so I could dump some files in there for it to back up. And yes, we called it XXX and then one of my staff stuck LOL you checked here. They think they're funny. All right, let's go and take a look at what that, what happens when we do restore for the file server backup. So, here's file server and actually we gotta do it from here. This is the, we can see that it's backed up. Last successful backup was 424. We go back to backup. We choose ask is gonna be file server. And the same thing, even though this one's less as a physical server, it works all the same as this in this. It just has that added option in the menu to be able to do a VM restore for it. So, here's that file server, here's the Synology test, here's a proposal. Let's go ahead and split the windows a little bit differently. Close it a little bit, there we go. So, let's take this proposal. Yes, we're gonna delete the proposal. Then we just go here, restore, same destination. Then we'll look over here. It should pop up in a second to tell me the restore was completed successfully and it's back. Didn't even tell me the notification yet. And it does, yep, there we go. Now it's back. It files back before the notification. I think the notification is probably still waiting and doing that. So, from a restore standpoint, it's fast, it's effective. The other thing you can do is download these out of here if you want. So, if you wanted to get a file back out, you can go, okay, I want this particular file back and I want to download it to here so we can hit download. And now we've opened up the proposal right here. So, without interfering with the user or without pushing it back, I want to copy locally here, log in to Synology, download that particular one and away we go. So, for all that goes, it's really simple and to access this particular portal, there is an option inside of here when you open up this Synology software. Full screen again, view backup status. You can create usernames for the server so they can log into it as well. So, they can open up the restore portal themselves and you can set permissions. That way users can self-manage it and it just launches them into the NAS specifically to the restore portal. So, if they had their own username and they had permission to run their backups, this becomes like a self-service way to do this. So, you don't have to do it from the Synology, you can do it from that workstation but you're still doing it from the Synology technically because you are always going to the web interface to push the data back and forth. Now, as far as like the client itself, it does support when you're in here, it'll update the client software that's on each of the PCs. So, it's a really robust automated system. But of course, the next question people want to know is can it do bare metal restores? Like it says, does that work? Because obviously backing up files is of great importance but we want full images of the machines because that's one of the real strong points. Especially when you take so much time to set up with a lot of clients, one of them we just deployed this at was a CAD and engineering company. They want full backups of their machine. That matters a lot to them because there's so much time and care taken into setting up all the different CAD software and design software they use. So, they like to have full images of those machines so if the hard drive goes bad, they can restore the machine back to its former glory without having to play and load a lot of software that can take hours or even days. There's so much stuff that have to be loaded when we replace machines for them. Now, let's go ahead and go over here. Here's the Synology Restore demo, Council. Now, we just took this Synology Restore media ISO booted. I'm doing this on a virtual machine but it works fine on a standard machine. A couple things about it. It's expecting to be restored to the same machine. This is not like some of the other imaging tools that we're used to that will take care of resizing and hardware differences. It's not expecting hardware differences so it doesn't do anything. It leaves windows to be windows when it comes to doing that. So, if you restore two different hardware, that may be a concern. Windows 10 is pretty forgiving compared to previous versions but just so you know, if you load on any custom drivers that interfere with that process, that will be an issue. As far as how the restore works, it's pretty straightforward. We go to the IP address that we just type in here under local network and it's name was Thomas Connect. Which PC are we gonna restore? Tom7PC or desktop PC? We're gonna go desktop PC and then you choose which one of the backups you wanna restore. I think this is pretty cool. As I said, it's a bare metal from the very first time I loaded this and we've been testing it on and off now for about a month to play around. I've done a few restores with this but I can also restore like previous versions on there if you want. And this is, like I said, really handy. So even though it's only taken a few minutes I think it showed about eight minutes through this last backup. It's still in compile the entirety of that machine based on everything it has. So this is really great. The downside and one thing I will mention though is it does not resize. So if you are taking someone who's had a hard drive failure you must at least put the same size hard drive or bigger in or it will fail. An important little notice when you do this but I've tested this. I've tested restoring different versions. It restores reasonably fast. I think on this, not as the fast connection I think it took about 20 minutes, 30 minutes to restore the whole machine but this was still very reasonable for a backup system that requires no licenses and it's pretty robust here being able to restore a full machine way faster than loading it. That 20 minutes is really nothing to get me done. And obviously mileage is going to vary whether or not you have these technologies as a faster versions of them whether or not you have SSDs in these computers or virtual machines are reasonably fast on the server but it's not as fast as a new modern higher end workstation. So you may get even faster restores on that. But overall, I really like the product. It is really one of those excellent small business solutions that are looking for something that doesn't have a bunch of fees attached to it. They want to manage themselves because they're technical or even home users. I mean, backing up your home machine, Synology's boxes are quite affordable for that and the specific distation we're using for this is the DS918 Plus with an Intel Soleron at 1.5 gigahertz. So this is not a super high end Synology. It's a pretty basic one. We threw four hard drives in there to do some of the testing and we have some more videos coming on this but it's not that expensive of a box. It's actually pretty reasonably priced for as many features as it is. And it's active backup though for small business solution. So this can be in for the bigger client. We saw this as a file server for them and then it also has another folder backing up to there and then redundancy we have itself to back plays which is an option in these as well to back everything up. So like I said, great product. The restores work just as expected and I like the convenience of just logging into the web interface and pushing the files back to wherever they belong when people, oops, I deleted something. So like I said, I highly recommend it. We've been happy with it and the testing we've done here in-house and the testing we've done because clients occasionally delete things have both proven that this is a very reliable box for getting this work done. We're really happy with it. All right, thanks. Thanks for watching. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up. If you want to subscribe to this channel to see more content, hit that subscribe button and the bell icon and maybe YouTube will send you a notice when we post. If you want to hire us for a project that you've seen or discussed in this video, head over to LawrenceSystems.com where we offer both business IT services and consulting services and are excited to help you with whatever project you want to throw at us. Also, if you want to carry on the discussion further, head over to forums.laurancesystems.com where we can keep the conversation going and if you want to help the channel out in other ways, we offer affiliate links below which offer discounts for you and a small cut for us that does help fund this channel. And once again, thanks again for watching this video and see you next time.