Beware of Dropbox!

I have an internet connection through the dynamic DNS provided by Synology. It looks something like yourname.synology.me.

Ahh… as I suspected. Thanks.

Interesting! How’s external backups done, as I don’t trust a single NAS inside the house, need to have a second backup in another location. Would a Backblaze account work?

At least Synology has some backup utilities that connect with most of the cloud providers. In my case I use all my Office 365 OneDrive cloud space to partially backup most critical data, encrypted.

Today, if you use Synology Hybrid Raid storage, it is very secure. Personally I have 4 disks with 1 disk tolerance fail, and a 5th one ready to auto-connect and rebuild in case of one of those disks fails. My only concern is if it is stolen.

And for extra safety you can have a second NAS in other location and maintain both synchronized with Synology technologies.

In this world of temporary fashions and other c00l fads, people use to say that NASes aren’t fashion and the fashion now is cloud… Well I never had a problem with my NASes (4 until now), and I’ve replaced them by real obsolescence (I wanted to do more with them), and continuously have problems with clouds… You only will take off my NAS from my dead hands… And don’t discard I will bite you.

I connect to services on my Synology remotely all the time. My primary filer is actually at a house I’m only in one week a month. You can use the DNS redirect thing but I run a VPN service on mine and that’s how I connect to it and the rest of my household network there when I’m away.

I use Resilio Sync to sync folders around (every workstation has their own dotfiles folder) but Synology has a service/software called Drive that does something very similar to Dropbox/Resilio/Onedrive (but without an API)

Since I’m dual-stack in that house I have routable public addresses on most systems and don’t need to use NAT redirects or portforwarding, etc. The VPN I use is software-defined (zerotier) but people run wiregard/openvpn/synologyVPN on their synology devices all the time.

It works fine for DEVONthink sync stores but I don’t do it remotely because it can get slow at times (I have gigabit cable at the house and FIOS fiber when i’m out in Philly) and Dropbox sync is much faster and reliable for me.

Thank you for pointing out Synology NAS as a solution. In the past, I did better in keeping as a principle to always have a full copy of my contents in a Linux server at home. But it’s been more than a year this computer isn’t turned on. Hopefully, I’ll recover from its disks part of the files lost by Dropbox, but the proper solution is more likely to be having an always-on NAS sitting on my desk.

A question for you guys using Synology: I’m considering buying the DS218j model. Can I keep a history of multiple versions of my files in the NAS? I read about the “Hyper Backup”, but it seems to create multiple backups in remote storages or cloud services (Blackblaze etc.). On the other hand, it seems that “snapshots” are exclusively available on hardware supporting btrfs filesystem (which isn’t the case with the model I’m considering buying).

Additionally, would you advise connecting the NAS to cloud services (Google Drive etc.)? My thinking is that if there’s no versioning, I might end up with the risk of the eventual data corruption or deletion in those services damaging the copies in the NAS. And now for one I know this kind of thing to be definitively possible!

I use Hyper Backup to back my important stuff up to a USB drive I have connected to my NAS. Not the best solution as both would be lost in something like a house fire, but I also have my DT data sync’d between a couple computers that are rarely in the same place. One of which is backed up to Backblaze.

Hyper Backup does incremental backups so you can roll back in time, much like Time Machine. (At least I’m almost certain it works that way. I have never had to test it.)

If you want multiple copies of your data on your NAS you can set up a nightly rolling copy, but I would think Hyper Backup would keep you safe. Another option would be to get a 4 bay Synology and use their Hybrid RAID. I have had my Synology email me several times over the years telling me a drive is going bad. I go on Amazon, order a new one, hot-swap the drives and the Synology rebuilds the data. It’s a pretty solid system. I have many TB of data on my NAS and have never lost a file. I have even had freelance clients come to me 10 years after they stopped using my services asking for files that I was able to provide off my NAS.

1 Like

I think the point is that given the risk of fire, flood, theft, etc to be truly secure you need some form of daily off-site backup. If you want to avoid the cloud completely, then that means using physical media to regularly move a backup to some other location.

@conteb I also use Synology NASes since 10+ years. I’m running Resilio-Sync on it, because that means: no vendor-lock-in, because Resilio-Sync just ‘syncs’ your files/folders peer-to-peer over any amount of devices (one of which is the Synology NAS). No other server involved.

I connect to the Synology using VPN (on my private files) and a DDNS-address provided by Synology for free - both of which work pretty good.

Just for the sake of my general paranoia, I’m backing up the important pieces of my Synologies (I have 2) to the Synology C2 backup-service, which is approx 6€/month per 1TB.

For my day-to-day business, I also run Dropbox on one of the Synologies (since it still has some advantages, eg. web-portal, easy sharing, etc…).

That being said: this whole system is pretty easy to set-up - thanks to the cool Synology DSM (Disk Station Manager) software and runs for me reliably since quite some time.

Recently, when Dropbox cutted the limit of connected devices in their free tier - I just switched those over to Resilio-Sync… which is not as comfortable as Dropbox, but works as good.

Synology has their own ‘Dropbox’ look-a-like (called ‘Drive’). I haven’t used it in a while, because it was quite buggy (and sucked my CPU badly) when it came out - but this was more than 3 years ago (iirc), so maybe it’s a good thing to check that out… And it comes for free with your Synology…

Or, have 2 Synology NAS’s and hook them up to sync to each other remotely. That’s built in as well. I just don’t have a second NAS so I find the risk acceptable.

Synology Drive is much better than it used to be. I use it exclusively. In fact, I also have my Synology hooked up to my old, free Dropbox account, but I have it place the Dropbox files in a folder inside Synology Drive to sync down to my computers. I only have the one connection to Dropbox, but I have the files on all my computers.

That’s not foolproof because there are situations where deleting files on one drive can cause the synced copy to be deleted also.

1 Like

I guess I should have stated it as “Use a second, remote Synology, as a destination for Hyper Backup”. Then you have the versioning rather than sync.

Thx for the insight. Sounds like there’s really no good solution for remote backup so I will stick to my hard drives and Backblaze running for remote backups and iCloud for sync the data (not the DT database). Too risky to put all the data in a single location that could be destroyed (or the unit stolen). iCloud DT sync would be great later.

There are lots of options for remote backups. I back up to AWS S3 and have never had a problem with it. It gives you the ability to recover various versions of files that it’s backed up and retained. I actually use Arq to do my workstation backups — one to my NAS and also they all go B2@Backblaze for cheap object storage. I think I’ve got about 20TB in S3/B2/GCS.

Also my DEVONthink offers an iCloud sync source but I haven’t used it yet.

Also my DEVONthink offers an iCloud sync source but I haven’t used it yet.

True, but remember: Sync is ​not ​a backup, neither advertised nor advocated as such. :slight_smile:

1 Like

Definitely didn’t mean to imply anything is a backup except for the versioned backups I do with Arq or Hyperbackup :slight_smile:

@fotan Do you use ‘Drive’ on a Mac? Did you ever compare CPU-load when syncing large folders?
Any insights?
Currently my DT databases are all offloaded peer-to-peer using ResilioSync, which works great but isn’t the fastest… The DT databases in current use are synced via iCloud which works pretty good, but is far away from instant, so I’m still open for ideas :wink:

I don’t sync big folders through Drive. At least not big folders that change much.

Having the sync-store databases on my NAS and connecting through WebDAV syncs happen almost instantly. At least as fast as DT auto-syncs.

I find if I don´t get good customer service, if I post a public tweet about the problem suddenly most companies are very responsive. Just make sure to use the company name a couple of times and complain about the service too.