 Tom here from Warren Systems and we're going to talk about Synology Active Backup for Business, very specifically the active backup for backing up computers or Synologies or other NAS devices, virtual machines, etc. The Synology Active Backup for Microsoft 365 or Google G Suite, Google Workspace, whatever you're calling it these days is another video I have linked in the description below. Now first, this is not a sponsored review, but we are a Synology reseller and we do a lot of Synology consulting. My experience I'm sharing is from doing that consulting from doing these deployments and my biases are well I wouldn't sell a product that didn't work so I will at least disclose all that up front so you know where I stand on the product and why we choose it. Now Synology Active Backup for Business is great but not necessary for every situation and we're going to start by going over to my forum post and this forum post is a list of what we love, what we don't love here in January 2023 and I'm hoping there's a future video coming that I make where these problems are addressed. I have actually talked to Synology about them. I know it's stuff they are working on but there's no dates for any of this being fixed and we'll get to that in the description down below. You'll find this link where we can dive into these details together or just comment and post on my forums for if you want to have a more in-depth discussion which I usually say for the end of the video but hey I always like to hear people's thoughts in the comments and over in my forums so let's jump over there. Now the first thing I'll mention is I said for backing up local systems in this here because that's the ideal way to set this up but yes it will work over a VPN provided you have the bandwidth to do so. It also does an initial backup which is going to be larger and then incremental thereafter so yes you could do the full backup first and then take it off site and use a VPN but consider bandwidth if you're doing that and also don't open up the ports to the internet as I said use a VPN. Now the first good thing about this is the no licensing no subscriptions limitations are your available storage and concurrent numbers of backups that you can find details here on the different Synology NAS models and their backup support. They have a list that gives you how many backups you can do simultaneously on these. The Synology NAS is either supported or don't it's not an upsell or a feature you buy it's just a feature that comes with a lot of different models. I am leaving that link here so whenever you're watching this in the future you can get your list and see what the most current ones and what their concurrent number of backups they support as far as how much storage that's a function of how much do you need to back up and how much storage you have available and that will determine really how many you can back up it's the concurrent that you have to consider when you're doing a bunch of simultaneous. If you have a office full of 100 of them you're going to need a machine if you want those 100 back up at once or you want to stagger them those are some of the decisions that Synology can help you decide by looking at the different models and how many concurrent they offer on those different models. Storage is made efficient though with deduplication for example backing up a office full of Windows machines you're going to find that some of those machines probably have a lot of the same files on there and it can deduplicate and reduce your overall need for storage in that pool. Now we can of course back up Windows 10 11 Windows servers using their agent but there's also agent list backups of SMB file shares granular permissions and encryption options bare metal restore so yes you can restore this either via their bootable USB when you create the media which I recommend always having ready ahead of time that way if you have to restore something you grab their USB bootable media and you grab a machine to put it back on or replace the hard drive in it and if you're going to dissimilar hardware Windows is way more forgiving than it used to be when you do this install and you can do this to load it on a different system you may have Windows prompt you for reactivation but yes you can restore it self-service restore portal this isn't a way you can have and restore a specific file but yes it can be restored to not just one machine you can restore a file from one machine back to another machine so there's some diversity you have in terms of options and we'll show that later in the demo VMware and Hyper-V integration this is great because it can talk directly to your VMware or Hyper-V system and do the backups or do restores to those without you having to go through any type of manual process it can integrate very good with those I don't have that as a demo because I have neither one of those systems set up but it's a nice integration it can do automatic backup verification as a task you can set up your backup tasks and you can also add to that backup task you may not want it on all of them but I left that as a link so you can go through house knowledge process work we will do a demo of that but that automatic backup verification will take and restore that physical machine to a VM I think this is a great feature to be able to do that it does a recording and let you play that recording back so you can confirm that the backup didn't just go it works now the other reason I left the link to that is there are some prerequisites you have to have a machine with enough resources to do that automatic backup verification it's an important feature of it is you can't restore a machine that needs 16 gigs of RAM to boot if you at least don't have that much available on the Synology you're trying to do this on now the instant restore for VMware Hyper-V and Synology virtual machine manager we'll do a demo of doing it to the Synology virtual machine manager this is kind of a cool feature where you can take any one of the physical servers and just instantly restore them or instantly start them on a Synology system now Linux supports not something I really use because I left it with the link here called limited support they have very specific OS systems that they support and that's it you can't deviate outside of there it's only certain kernels supported and certain operating systems so I say limited support if you want to use it that's why that link is there if you want to understand it better things that are missing central management allowing easy viewing of multiple systems at multiple sites if you have 70 plus businesses and you would like to be able to view all the different backups going on there you have to start logging into every dashboard they just haven't created a good central dashboard for this I don't really know why it's taking so long I get it it's hard but it seems like this is a feature that is something I request and I'm sure a lot of others would love to have and it kind of keeps Synology out of the managed service provider market in my opinion because it's hard to manage when you have a lot of different businesses you don't want to log into every one of these and look at a report you'd like to have everything on one central dashboard they do have active insight which I'm hoping is where we'll eventually get this feature and they have their CMS which is a locally hosted central management system by Synology to talk to other Synologies but neither one of those tell you the individual backup status they will tell you if the service is running on each of these Synologies but it won't give me the granular details of every machine that's backed up and if there's any errors now I know you can set the system to notify you of errors notify you of completion but that also scales up to be a problem because if you talk about managing 70 sites and each one of those sites having quite a few computers now you have a different mess on your hand and it would just be better suited to a central dashboard like some of the other commercial tools out there no automatic agent update is also a weird thing that's missing I don't know why this is missing it's a puzzle to me it seems like that would be easy to do just put a checkbox so I can automatically update but that's not there I've also occasionally had trouble where the update agent wouldn't run on systems that were off you would tell it and it's supposed to queue the command and I've had it sometimes fail without error you just run it again and it works that's been a puzzle now if the agent is online and systems online it's worked every time but I have noted that when they switched to the 2.5 I did the updates and that was a puzzle it just decided it wasn't going to I thought that was a little strange but me I'm being honest here about that's a challenge I've run into but without an error message or a way to repeat it it's not been a bug I've been able to report there are a few options in the active backup menu they're very clear and obvious but I cannot find a good chart that clearly explained the difference between personal computer and physical server so I made this one and I mean that sincerely I read through a lot of documentation and this is one of those nuances of why would you even use personal computer if physical server does the same thing and for the most part I get it you want to keep the personal computers and all the you know windows workstations in one place and all the physical servers in another place in terms of the way the backup is but it also there's some challenges to that one of them is kind of confusing to me and I use this on my personal computer one with my studio computer because with the studio computer I love these event-based trigger startup and shutdown that's really the only thing missing over here besides macOS support from the physical server one and what this means is every time I turn my computer on I want to kick off a backup and you can also have a backup again when it shuts down that's just not a feature you can do when it's set to physical server but if you want to use these other features such as auto verify backup restore to ESXi instant restore or hyperv restore application where backups and pre-post scripts you have to put them in the physical server category now it's arbitrary which when you put even though it says server you can still back up your windows 10 and 11 workstations under the physical server but that's just the nuance of the way this system works inside that's why I made this little chart just to make sure people are clear on what is or isn't supported here in January 2023 for the different versions now of note I have this video down here the Synology active backup for Microsoft 365 and Google workspace I've done a video on the topics an older video but it's still relevant it's still something that we've helped set up for clients it's a nice feature that they have in their systems let's start by taking a look at the dashboard here this is the one of my office when we have six pcs in here set for backups then we have our backup calendar which is about 30 days back and you can see all these green to let me know that there were four successful backups if I mouse over here for here three here that's because some computers are in the office some people work from home different days of the week but this gives you the idea and actually will give you another idea here of how much deduplication is occurring so for the data reduction we're at 1.9x for the amount of data that's been reduced and I'm doing a mouse over to be able to get that so we have 1.3 terabytes but after you deduplicate it you're saving 392 gigs across these machines because they're similar enough that's just all the files that can be crossed out for those particular backups now I also have a analogy here at my studio and this one has a failure and it matter of fact the other day one of the backups failed and you can have these reports sent to you on an individual basis as I said for each site where you can have the system say hey if this fails send me a notice but we can go into and dive into the reports when there is a failure and I do have a notice that was sent to me let me know this backup failed it took a look at it and said oh yeah that's right I was running Windows updates at that time so if you look at the task history you can see it 1652 it failed about an hour later worked perfectly fine and not a big deal when that happens the you can always rerun you can go to any of these tasks and we'll go back over here to personal computer task list and I can just rerun it manually if needed it's not that often that there's a problem with the failure but I did find it interesting that when I was running Windows update it didn't work but that makes sense because Windows update also sometimes is modifying volume shadow copy which is used to create the snapshots now in terms of all the versions you have all the versions here which you can go look you can go here to see if there's any other information or delete that version which there's no other information we'll get to a demo where there is because that's part of the backup restore process for doing the verification but if we wanted to purge and maybe I don't need this one from this particular day I can hit and just delete this particular one but you set your retention settings when you set these up and when you add these if you want to create a task or add a device you can either add the device here from the personal computer or add them to the physical server now as far as the strategy NAS back up that one's a little bit more obvious you would add the physical NAS that you wanted to back up and then going down here to the file server you can add a server and you choose SMB or arcing server pretty simple same thing with virtual machines you can connect it to your VMware your Hyper-V and create your task list related to that but I have neither of those set up and then here's that just general storage and the reduction on my system which for two systems is about 1.7x because they're both running Windows 10 restore status activities general activities and kind of a task history report and log report so I do like that you have a nice logging history that you can set to go through here and you can run reports so if I want to run a monthly backup report you can just generate the report here daily monthly and we'll actually just show you what the report looks like an open report gives you a history of the usage over whatever time period you request it I think this is a nice feature to be able to present once again though it's only doing it on each instance of snelligee active backup now as I said you can do a bare metal restore which is pretty simple but let's go through and actually show you what would do for a granular restore through the portal this is probably the more common use case and I like that you have an instant timeline here now when you're restoring it you'll get images from the backup for doing a bare metal restore but you're a little more granular when you're doing the active backup portal so stew is my studio computer and for each backup there's a date we can jump to so we can go to all these different dates that we have available to us and click on that particular date and go to that particular version so if I needed stuff from however long my retention policy set I think the oldest ones I have are 115 that's as far back as I go because I'm not going by date I'm going by number of revisions but I can go to this version of it and then I can go into the users maybe I want to go into this particular user stew and what does stew have for downloads and there's some capture utility files all right maybe I want to restore that file or download it I can download it here I can restore it to stew or I can choose my yeming system which is offline right now so it's going to give an error but yes you can restore it it'll pull up and it's querying directly that system and says you can restore it to any active online system so I can actually switch and we'll close this and close because it failed and we'll switch this now to tom's gaming system and same rules apply so we'll go here to disk users tom let's go to tom's downloads hey there's the rocat swarm software maybe crystal disk that I was testing and maybe I want to restore it to another system hit make sure I'm choosing stew because stew is online the studio computer and then I can actually push this file I'll actually do that let's go to push that one to the downloads on this computer so go to downloads hit okay and we want to take this particular file and restore it to here hit okay and the process gets kicked off and that runs in the background and now I can go to that system and grab that file now I want to jump over to our Synology FS 3410 there's a review video down below where I reviewed this specific system and showed how fast it can do an instant restore but I also want to show you the backup verification process so we have two tasks server backup and backup and test and restore you may not want to run these concurrently every time and I see that because you can do it all in one process so if you look at the server backup and we edit this task I can easily check the box right here that says enable backup verification the problem is I may not have the resources or the need to do that on every single time I run the backup so if I run the backup daily maybe I only want to create a second task that only runs maybe once a week to do the restore and maybe you stagger that with other systems because you have several servers and you don't want to try and restore all of them once that's up to you but this is the strategy that you can do by creating multiple tasks around a single instance so it's got a many to one relationship here now when you're on these tasks you click on version and it will tell you if there's a verify backup status or we're going to go here because this one does if we edit this task we have it set to enable backup verification and we go here we click on a version and what it does is every time this backup task has run which I've run it twice we end up with this little browse the live video backup option so we click this and it brings up a folder now in this folder is the image file and also a live video so the image file not a snapshot image but an image that we can download an img file of the backup and we have one here as well it creates them all in these folders that was kind of weird they don't have like a player natively built in but you can right click and hit play and it's going to open in a new window and it'll walk you through the process that it goes through and this is a one minute 20 second video and runs through it's recording the screen of the Synology virtual machine manager and this is like I said the file it automatically created it injects first the drivers for Synology the Synology agent and then we're 19 20 seconds in it's booting up again applying computer settings and booted so it takes about 30 seconds to do the restore on this particular machine as fast as it is and based on the fact that this is not a particularly large Windows server that I have installed if you have a Windows server that has well a lot of data in it's going to take longer to do this restore and longer to do this process so something you should keep in consideration when you're doing it now one more thing that creates a little bit of confusion if you go to personal computer and we look at this particular system and I see the file folder or entire device an entire device walks you through the media creation if you have to do a bare metal restore pretty simple but if you're on the physical server like this one here you'll notice that there's a restore button but it's kind of different because it has these options that bring you to this restore to be able to do an instant restore for example to any one of these destinations now that leads people to believe how do you do the file of a restore and that's where the nuance comes in you can still open up the active backup restore portal so we go to active business restore portal and it loads and there's our system here it's kind of weird that restore portal is linked on the pc backup one it's just not linked on the other one but you can still go to the active backup for business restore portal and still get to it I've seen comments where people thought maybe you couldn't if it was set up physical server do the restore portal but the restore portal works the same for either one of those options it's just the way it's linked is different because you have to go directly to the active backup for business launch not launch it from the other way but both work it's just a little bit of a weird nuance that they don't bother adding an extra button right there a little bit of confusion hope that clears it up for some people now I hope this video left you with enough information for you to decide if the active backup system is right for you if it didn't or I didn't have enough details in or other questions you have I'd love to hear your thoughts and comments down below or just say hi also if you like to have a more in-depth discussion more than us allowed in the YouTube comments section that is why this is a forum post which is also linked to my forums down below where we can have a more in-depth and more engaging discussion also take the time to read Synology's documentation it's extensive there's a lot of it I think they did a great job on documentation I just tried to summarize it a bit because that can be sometimes a challenge when you want to make a decision of how much time do you want to commit to reading documentation just to try out a product so if you have a few other questions as I said leave them below and 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 if you like to hire a short project head over to laurance systems dot com and click the hires button right at the top to help this channel out in other ways there's a join button here for youtube and a patreon page where your support is greatly appreciated for deals discounts and offers check out our affiliate links and description of all of our 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