 Tom here from Learning Systems and we're going to talk about Synology Snapshots. This is a really cool feature that you can use in addition to other backups that you're using. The reason you may want to use Snapshots is because they work as Snapshot points in time for a particular folder that you may set up as a schedule that you can also go and replicate even to another Synology. A couple prerequisites. That first one is going to be it has to be formatted with ButterFS and second, support the Snapshot packages. Synology has a list under sight of which models support it linked down below. Next, if you want to replicate it to another Synology, same rules apply. It doesn't have to be the same Synology unit. You can take a larger Synology NAS and have a smaller Synology NAS that you replicate these Snapshots to. Next, these Snapshots will present as volume shadow copies under a window share. This is awesome because it allows users to right click on a folder and see the previous versions of those files or folders. This means you, if you're an IT admin, don't have to be bothered or just from a simplicity standpoint, you don't have to go into the Synology to be able to right click and restore a previous version. Something of note in this is very important. I mentioned ransomware recovery in the title and the reason why is because, yes, this can be a fast way to recover if there was an incident, not just a I clicked on something and deleted it accidentally incident, which is pretty common with users or overwriting a file, but the worst case scenarios that often happen with ransomware, but there's another prerequisite for that. And that's that you don't use the same credentials to manage your Synology, which will allow the admin of these Snapshots that you use for your windows domain that you use for your users. The tools that are available, such as these Snapshots are really great for being able to offer you a quick rollback. But if you just reuse the same passwords and threat actors get your password, they're just going to go through each one of these systems and either disable or delete them from the admin menus and break those backups. This goes as really the same for any backup process. If it's all sharing the same credentials, you've kind of negated a lot of this because well, the threaters may not just attack the system, they will look and try and use the same credentials, maybe that logged into that system elsewhere on your network. I just want to make sure that's clear upfront because that is a frequent problem. And I wish it wasn't so frequent of a problem. Nonetheless, it's something you can prevent and set up good password hygiene, just want to set a reminder for it. All right, now let's jump into the demo. And I will want to mention once again, really quickly, I have a link down below to the Synology Replication documentation. It's great. Take the time to read through it and you can understand some of the extra features they have in there and maybe go beyond what I'm going to cover in this video is this quick demo. But yes, it is well documented. I have this company biz data folder, which is going to be our demo where we have some, actually it's got my t-shirt designs in there. I threw in some of those in here, I threw some notes, manuals, lots of random data so we can test and show you how this works. Now there's currently no snapshots at all set up. And currently we have no scheduled replication, no snapshots, but this is the snapshot tools that you have to load to get this working. Pretty simple. We just go to the package manager and install it. There's not anything special you really have to do. Now in terms of doing the snapshots, we can take one manually, we can look at the list to see if there's any on there. But let's first go over to my window system and show you what this share looks like right now. And here's the share in Windows. And let's just right click on this particular folder and we're going to go to restore previous versions. There's no previous versions to restore because there's no snapshots. In order to start the snapshot process, we're going to go here and we'll just do a manual snapshot. So we'll do one. We're not going to lock it. Locking is just since here prevents the snapshot from being automatically moved during the creation of schedule snapshots when you set up retention policies. But we'll just call this one test. Processing and it happens relatively fast depending on the data depending on the system itself. But now we can go to the snapshot list. We see test, we see the calculate size and it'll tell you how much was snapshot and how much size was used. Pretty straightforward here, but there's really not much difference in this particular snapshot because we haven't made any changes. We just said that's the point in time we wanted to save. And that point in time when we look at the list here is going to be the 1024 AM. So let's go back over to the window system. And if we right click on that folder again, and we say really restore previous version, we see same timestamp on it, the previous version available. So let's go here to like notes, and even like a file, for example, go here and say restore previous version. Now, because it hasn't changed, there's not a new version of this, but I would be able to see it on the folder itself. If we say restore previous version, and I wanted to make sure that was clear because what we're going to do is take this note, whatever was in here, there's not much in here, save. All right, now we have saved this note. So now it has less data than it did before. As a matter of fact, let's just fill it with some gibberish here. And now we want to be able to restore that previous version. So now if we go click on it again, and we want to restore previous version, there's that version. And the previous date isn't the date of the snapshot, it's the date that the metadata had for this particular file, which was 52621. And we can restore that version. So we know currently I just have some gibberish in there. Let's go ahead and hit restore. Do we want to restore it? Absolutely. Go ahead and hit restore. Hit successfully restored previous version. That's all you have to do to enable it is start having the snapshots. Now we'll get into the schedules in a second, but I want to point out something else. So now it's back to its original form. But let's go ahead and look at something a little bit different when it comes to doing this. Restore previous version. Notes, and let's open it as a folder. All right, now I've got this special folder, and it tells me the date on there, but let's go ahead and do this. Let's delete everything in here. That didn't work. Let's try it again. Nope, I can't delete these. This is the part I want to make clear. The end user attached to the share. So if a threat actor, for example, in the ransomware scenario, we're able to get to this end user's system like this, that does not grant them permission to do snapshots. Volume shadow copies are a method that Microsoft uses, but they're not exactly how they work when you're using Samba and Synology. What they're doing is presenting as volume shadow copies, but they're immutable. The end user does not have permission in this context in order to delete or edit them. They're actually snapshots that presented as read only to the user. This is what allows you to roll things back when users have goofed things up without the end user being able to delete all those extra ones. That question comes up a lot. So I want to make that part clear. Now let's talk about scheduling and how the replication works. So back over here to our Synology. And actually, let's go ahead and we're going to remove this particular snapshot. We don't need it. And let's set up enable automatic snapshots. We want them daily. Well, for demo purposes, I actually want them even more options. We're doing these things every five minutes because I need a lot of them. And we're going to kick this demo off. So now we have snapshot schedule and then retention policy. Let's keep the last 20 of them. That works. Or you can keep the last seven days worth. Or you can set custom rules so you have a lot of different granular options for maybe you want this many at this time. And this allows you to get kind of detailed because maybe you want this constant rolling snapshot, but you don't want to take up how much space it would take. So you want those to expire, you know, frequently, but then you want to be able to jump back one. So at least one of these is a month old, at least one of these is the year old, at least one of them so on and so forth. So they do give you some granular options for simplicity. We're just going to say keep the last 20. Hit OK. And now they're scheduled. Okay, so I jumped ahead a couple of minutes, we let it do its automated snapshots, just we can keep it simple here. And we'll take another one so I don't have the patience to wait forever. And we'll just say another test, hit OK. So now we have two snapshots, it's processing, but let's go ahead and make some changes here. And that change is going to be, we're just going to delete everything in this folder, we're just going to purge it, blow it out. Here we go. We are deleting all the items in this particular folder. Now I wanted to do it this way to show, because we're going to do another snapshot again, and show you how fast we can do the restore. So we've deleted it or, you know, if it was a ransomware incident, we could have encrypted it that fast as well. So switch back over. And to that we're going to use the recovery. So we go here to recover, we click on recover. We want this version here that was from 1030 before we deleted. So we'll go and restore this action, and we want to restore to this snapshot. Take snapshot before restoring. No, I don't want to, don't mind. So we deleted everything. So there's nothing I'm worried about preserving, restore the settings to the shared folder. This restore settings, including shared folder quota, user quota privileges, advanced settings under SMB settings. You can do that. I didn't change any of them, but you can hit okay. And it's going to go processing. And that's it that quickly. And obviously it's going to depend on the volume of data and how fast your NASA's, but that was able to restore all of our data. So we go over here to windows, refresh, all the data is exactly back. All right. Now that we know all the data was restored, let's talk about how to do this with multiple Synology. So you can have all this protection and also replicate it to another device. And we do that by going to create under replication and guide you through this local or remote. If you have multiple volumes, you would be able to choose and you can actually replicate the data between multiple volumes, you may have set up on your Synology, but we're going to choose another Synology. So we choose remote and we type in the IP address of that Synology. And yes, it does support server name, but we're doing this all by IP using cryptic connection. I put the username and the password into this particular Synology. It sees where it's going to be backing up to you. And we choose what we want backed up with these snapshots next, send the initial copy over the network is estimated to take about 13 seconds because it measures the speed between these devices. But by the way, it measures the speed between devices, not the speed of the drives in it. So I actually know it's going to take a little bit longer, or you can actually choose a storage location to create like a seed copy and do an import. We're just going to send it over the network over here and sync immediately after the creation of the replication task. So we're going to get next. You can choose a schedule and this schedule can be different than your other schedule for your local snapshot. So maybe you're only sending this once a night or during a specific transfer window because they have transfer window options. Well, you can have these replications going, but then they only go during certain periods. But we'll go ahead and just leave this all at default as a daily, but like I said, it's all granular. If you want to get more detailed on how you have these going next, number to keep. Now you can keep different policies for the remote retention versus the local retention as well. Just pointing that out. We're just going to keep say seven days worth that are going to the other analogy next. They can also replicate all the other ones you did just under replicate schedules, local snapshots. So those local snapshots can be replicated as well. And we'll click next, we're not going to bother with that done. And it's going to kick off the process. Now I want to point something out. The other system did not contain any data called company biz data or anything like that. It's going to create those folders for you. So if we go over here to the other Synology and we look at the snapshot replication and snapshots, it's kicking off the process of the Synology is pausing a little bit right now. And right here we go, it says located on volume one, it's receiving all that data. I believe we go to file station right now. It won't even show anything, but an error saying, I don't have permission to that particular folder because it's doing it on the fly right now and creating it. And okay, it just shows no data in there. I know if you try to expand it, it will. Oh, okay. So it will show stuff until it's while it's synchronizing or maybe finished already. Yeah, it finished already. So now it's showing up. I know if you click into it while it's waiting, sometimes it says wait till it's done because you don't have permission for this. Just wanted to make note that you don't have access to all the data until this replication task has completed. Now the final thing I think is really cool is how you do the recovery on here. I think this is a nice feature because obviously you're taking data from Synology A and putting it on Synology B, but how do you get that data back? They've actually built in some recovery options where you can take these snapshots, clone with a new name so you can easily view them all local. That's easy, but they also have the failover or switch over. You can force it because maybe the other Synology isn't working anymore, but maybe you just want to do a switch over and you want to make this system the one that has the data sending it back the other way. They actually allow you to pretty easily reverse these back and forth between those options. I like this because this question comes up a lot of how do I get the data? I'm like, well, you have it, but then you have to share it back out. They've already created the share in the file station here, so this is actually an active share on this particular one, but then you can just point users to the other Synology and all their data's right there. So in the case of kind of a failover disaster, the last replicated copy, and if you have this replication on a local networking, you run it relatively quickly, you have a quick way to recover on a whole nother Synology, or if it's a temporary because you're taking the other one down for some reason, you could do switch over to use this one, then resync the data back to the main one, and they've kind of got a process you can follow to do that. But I thought that was just nice that they added that little feature on there so you don't have to reset these up. You could actually just do the switch over or you can even test the failover. And if we hit test failover, it actually is going to create an extra copy with the name test in it. So test failover and process. And it's making sure that this process will work pretty easy to do without disrupting the users. We look at file station here. There's the test failover data that is shared under this relatively straightforward to do. I really like this feature of being able to view these CDs, hit info, you can get the statistics, have the statistics in terms of how fast the data's going across if there's any challenges, then bandwidth considerations you have. And as I said, it's only each time it does these replications doing the differential between the last time it did a replication and snapshot. So it's not a lot of data unless you created a lot of data. So you may have 2.7 gigs of data. But if you only change a few kilobytes, then the snapshot the next time it runs only changes those few kilobytes. As always, I love hearing from you. So leave your questions, comments and thoughts down below or head over to my forums for a more in depth discussion and take the time to read through this Nausea documentation. They took the time to write it, they put together a good documentation that'll maybe answer questions or go more in depth than I've covered in here. But hey, let me know your thoughts, love hearing from you and thanks.