How to Setup and Use New Synology Active Backup for MacOS

Synology has finally release their active backup for business app with MacOS support! This tutorial goes over how to setup Active Backup for Business for MacOS clients, as well as other options such as time machine.

#MacOS #Tutorial #Synology

Affilate Links: (Synology Recommendations)
Going 10GbE:

I have a new audio workflow and would love to hear if people found a difference!

[udirt]

I had switched to this after my office time machine SSD ran full... Backup speed was nice, but I had to uninstall it just 4-5 days later because it completely fried all disk access, to the point that even its own uninstaller didn't work. They have a very long way to go on this one. came here because you documented your issue with the leftover user account, and hat's off to you for digging into the little details like that.

[fousay]

I have a question, could you create a video on how to restore from the synology and / or the restore wizard on the Mac on the latest DSM. Like what if you restore from a fresh install or new Mac… Also what’s if you had an issue with the system how to restore existing account ? Thank you for your content, very helpful

[a_mouse]

Great tutorial! But a lingering question. Traditionally Apple has embedded drivers into hardware firmware, such that startup is controlled without a BIOS or EFI drivers. Thus in the old days we could just make a file level backup that was bootable. Has this changed? What distinguishes "bare-metal" from "file-level" backup in the case of MacOS?

[inellly]

I was litterally looking for an alternative to Time Machine for my Synology NAS and you came out with a new video.

How did you know?

Top work as usual SpaceRex!

[hassanpaywandi]

Thanks for the video. Just couple of questions: 1. The reduced security on Mac once the set up done does it need to be reset so no one else can have access or reduce access only limited to Synology then it reset for any other one? So no risk of hacking my Mac.
2. If i download the active business back up for my Mac do I need to do the same for Microsoft laptop for my wife again? Will that create two separate fold for each of us? If not how can I do back up for each of uss separately.
Thanks.

[akswrkzvyuujhd]

Thanks for the tutorial on putting ABB on Apples. The more people that that actually use this feature, the more "encouragement" Synology will have to improve it!

[kiben]

Thanks for the video, super useful.
A question about encryption. In another video, you talked about the benefits of using volume encryption over encrypting shared folders. If I have encrypted the volume, is it ok to keep encryption disabled here?

[BrendanJosephClarke]

Thanks for Explaining this setup... worked like a charm thanks for all of your assistance!

[solaris]

Excellent video. Im new mac user and im able to backup my MAC following the video

[SaberTech]

I'm curious if you've tested using the new compression options for ABB and if it's worth creating a new shared volume with new backup tasks to leverage that to save on space. I've done some reading and there seems to be a LOT of conflicting & confusing information and opinions out there.

[liutang]

Does de-dupe work across file shares? If I back up pc A -> fileshare A and pc B -> fileshare B, will dedupe work?

[berndott]

Been using it for months and generally love it as a centralised backup solution for multiple Macs. Thanks so much for this video!
Unfortunately since I updated my main computer, a M1 Max MacBook Pro to Mac OS 14 Active Backup stopped working properly. 1st Backup is fine, later backups, that should be incremental will take forever to start, cause an error -1 or -3 and copy everything again. So far customer service was unable to help. Anybody else here with problems on Mac OS 14 Sonoma and possible solutions?

[a_mouse]

Hi Will. Quick comment on my recent experiences trying to use ABB on a vintage mac running OpenCore. Sadly, you basically can't do it. ABB relies on asr, Apple's APFS replicator (Apple Software Restore), which is broken under OCLP (insert sad face here). So, at least for now, it must be a mac running a recent version of macOS natively. I think you might still be able to copy the Data volume though. But for this you can also just copy/update to a sparsbundle on the NAS, not sure if ABB has an advantage there. Thoughts?

[pinobud]

Great tutorial, thank you so much! I just have a quick question: do you have any idea why I cannot connect AB to my NAS? Neither on the local nor outside netowork. I have a VPN already set up.

[jph]

Hi Will, despite that I set to include the external drive it does not actually back this up!! I can find the drive name under volume but it is empty, my active backup has otherwise been running well for months. Is the contents of the drive somewhere hidden or is it indeed not backed up?

[shotbyarian]

would you recommend backing up external drives via synology drive or rather active backup (if already running)

[dustinroskam]

@Spacerex Would you set up multiple tasks for each laptop you are backing up? Or just 1 task and checkbox all devices you want backed up. Would each task require a separate encryption key?

[reneGOW]

Will why does it not find drives that are on a USB-C extension as I do not have enough ports on my M1 Mac Studio

[VCHKiN]

Maybe a dumb question - Is there a tutorial specifically for Windows that does not include the Mac steps? I want to make sure I know what to expect if a Windows computer has anything special to work on or look for.

[pedro_luna]

the best wat so I can backup an offsite mac from my mother? Does the time machine version works as well? She will not be at the same network with her computer.