Synology 2022 AND BEYOND

 Synology, Synology C2, Synology DiskStation  No Responses »
Dec 022021
 

As I’m watching the Synology: 2022 AND BEYOND event live I wanted to write this post to share with you some of my favorite parts.

For those of you wanting to tune in (while live) or watch the replay you can view it below.

You can also visit: https://event.synology.com/en-us/annual_event to watch the stream (or replay) and find out more information.

DSM 7.0.1 and DSM 7.1

As an IT professional and enthusiast, here’s a list of some of my favorite new features, functionalities and improvements.

DSM 7.0.1

  • High Availability Improvements
    • 40% less time needed for failovers and switchovers
    • 80% less time needed for system updates
  • System Responsiveness and Performance enhancements
    • 56x faster SMB (Windows File Share) searches
    • 70% speed up in application launches
    • 80% faster RAID 6 performance (for double parity RAID)
  • Enhanced Drive Replacement
    • Replace predicted failure/presumed unhealthy/to-be-retired drives with unused healthy drives that are in other bays.
    • Switch without degrading your array/storage pool
  • Auto Drive Replacement
    • Clones predicted failure/presumed unhealthy drive to available hot spare, switching automatically when the drive fails without requiring RAID rebuild time
  • Volume-wide data deduplication (on all flash arrays)
    • Scheduled or Manual Volume Wide Deduplication on all flash volumes
    • Click here for information on supported models and configurations
  • Synology Directory Server
    • Secondary domain controllers provide additional redundancy and availability of directory services
    • Provides ability to deploy additional domain controllers at additional locations

DSM 7.1 (Coming Soon)

  • SMB Multichannel
    • Utilize multiple network links and network connections to combine speed with SMB (Windows File Share) file transfers
    • Provides redundancy and fault tolerance
  • DFS Support over SMB
    • Combine multiple Synology NAS file servers to provide file services to your network using Distributed File System (DFS)
  • Active Insight
    • Numerous updates to make Active Insight more powerful when it comes to managing numerous Synology NAS units.
    • Enhanced control and information on System Updates
    • Suspicious activity detection recognizes suspicious activity on the NAS units (example: unusual login times and locations, unused accounts being used after being idle, failed logins, etc).
    • Task monitoring for Hyper Backup
  • Synology Directory
    • Read-only domain controller support provides ability to deploy read only domain controllers at remote sites that may not be physically secure while providing local cached copies of the directory.

And that’s not all…

Synology has also made numerous improvements to their Data Protection Services, Surveillance suite, Wireless Networking, Synology C2 Cloud, and more, but you’ll have to check it out for yourself. There are tons of other goodies for office workers, small business owners, photography enthusiast, and more that I haven’t included in this list.

Synology NAS backup to Synology C2 Cloud

 Synology, Synology C2, Synology DiskStation, Video Posts  2 Responses »
Oct 092021
 

One of the new real cool features of the Synology C2 Cloud and Synology DSM 7.0 is the ability to back your Synology DiskStation NAS up to the cloud.

Using the Synology’s “C2 Storage” service, you can use Synology Hyper Backup on DSM 7.0 to backup your your File Shares, NAS, applications, and data to the cloud.

Below, I will show the process of creating a Hyper Backup Backup task to backup a few Synology File Shares to the Synology C2 Storage Service.

NAS Backup (and Restore) with Synology C2 Cloud Video

For a full video guide and demonstration, please enjoy this video! Please continue scrolling for a text guide (with images).

Synology DiskStation NAS Backup (and Restore) with Synology C2 Storage Cloud!

Backup NAS to Synology C2 Storage

It’s very easy to back your NAS up to the cloud. Here’s a quick guide showing how it’s done.

We’re going to assume you already have some File Shares configured on your NAS. These can be Windows File Shares, NFS Exports, and even Active Backup for Business storage repositories. In my case, I want to back up 2 Windows File Shares to the Synology C2 Storage service.

  1. Open Hyper Backup
  2. If you have no existing backup jobs, the “Backup Wizard” should automatically open to configure a new job. If you have existing jobs, select the “+” on the top left of the window.
  3. Under “Backup Destination”, choose “Synology C2 Storage”.
    Hyper Backup Destination
  4. This will open a new window asking you to log on to the Synology C2 Storage Service. You may have to create a new account, or log in with your existing Synology credentials. From here you can start a free trial.
    Synology C2 Storage - Get Free Trial Now
  5. Choose a subscription and plan. You should get a 30-day free trial.
    Synology C2 Storage - Select your C2 subscription
  6. Confirm your subscription
    Synology C2 Storage - Confirm Subscription
  7. Accept the TOS (Terms of Service)
    Synology C2 Storage - Terms of Service
  8. You must now “Grant access to C2 Storage”. This will allow your user account to access the C2 Storage service.
    Synology C2 Storage - Grant Access
  9. You will now be presented with information on your Synology C2 Storage Account
    Synology C2 Storage Account Information
  10. You will now be redirected back to Hyper Backup. You’ll need to create a name for the new backup task destination directory.
    Hyper Backup Destination Settings
  11. Here’s where you will configure which File Shares (or volumes) to backup to Synology C2.
    Hyper Backup Choose Data Backup Sources
  12. You also have the ability to backup Synology Applications. This is helpful should you wish to backup your entire Synology NAS to Synology’s C2 cloud. I’m only doing shares, so I hit next without selecting anything.
    Hyper Backup Application Backup
  13. Now we will configure the Backup Task settings. This includes the task name, notifications, file change logs, bandwidth limits, backup schedule, and integrity check schedule. We can also “Enable client-side encryption” which we will use to encrypt the data on the cloud.
    Hyper Backup Backup Settings
  14. After proceeding, we will now configure backup rotation settings. I enabled backup rotation with “Smart Recycle”.
    Hyper Backup Rotation Settings
  15. If you enabled encryption, you will be prompted to download your encryption key. Save this file in a safe location as you will need it in the event your NAS fails and you need to access your cloud storage.
    Hyper Backup Synology C2 Encryption PEM key file

And that’s it! You have now configured your NAS to backup to Synology C2 Cloud!

Hyper Backup NAS Backup to Synology C2 Cloud
Hyper Backup NAS Backup to Synology C2 Cloud

We have now configured the backup job. Let’s go ahead and kick off a backup by clicking on “Back up now”.

And that’s it! After some time, your backup should complete and you data should be safe on the Synology C2 Cloud.

What happens when your run of out space

This is a question many of you will be asking, and I was curious myself. I went ahead and uploaded a bunch of garbage data to max out my plan.

Synology Hyper Backup C2 Storage - Not enough quota available on the target
Synology Hyper Backup C2 Storage – Not enough quota available on the target

To my surprise Synology allowed me to exceed my plan by a decent amount of storage until the backup job went in to a “Suspended” state reporting “Not enough quota available on the target”. I actually exceeded the storage by 128GB!!! This is extremely generous!

Synology C2 Storage - Storage overage
Synology C2 Storage – Storage overage

To find out how well the NAS would recover from this situation, I logged on to the Synology C2 Storage service and increased my purchased storage. I was able to simply click on “Action” and “Resume” the backup without any issues… It actually resumed where it left off.

Conclusion

The Synology C2 Storage Cloud service is a great option for backing up your DiskStation NAS and all your important files to the cloud. In my case I use my NAS as a backup, and then further backup my NAS both to a removable hard drive, and the Synology C2 Cloud, keeping me compliant with the 3-2-1 backup rule.

The pricing is amazing and there’s extra cost to backup and restore, which means no upload or download costs. They even provide de-duplication so you’re not paying to store duplicated data.

As part of the backup process, Hyper Backup only copies over blocks of data and files that have changed, which significantly helps bandwidth usage as only what’s changed is copied.

I highly recommend using Synology C2 Storage with your Synology DiskStation NAS!