How Pro Photographers should back up a Synology NAS! #SynologyBackup

#SynologyBackUp #SeagateBackupPlus #PhotographyWorkflow

This video will give you an overview of how I back my Synology NAS system using various stand alone hard drives for both on and off site backup. As of this filming the drive that I recommend is the Seagate BackUp Plus 8 or 10 TB, it carry a good median price per storage value in the market at the moment and it is a great drive to use for long term storage. I don't recommend using these drives for daily image editing because they are slower drives. The software that I recommend for Mac is Carbon Copy Cloner and for PC Good Sync, links below:

Mac Carbon Copy Cloner

PC Windows 10 Good Sync

If you can hold off on buying these until they are on sale. If you are in the US Costco have sales for the 8 TB model at least 2 - 3 times per year and they are priced at around $120
Seagate Backup Plus on Amazon
BH Photo

#PhotographyNAS #SynologyBackup #NAS

[-OzSteve]

Another thing you need to be aware of with a NAS is that it might provide protection from drive failure, but the RAID controller in the NAS is still a single point of failure. If the RAID controller or even the motherboard dies (unlikely but not impossible), then you can't just take your drives out and read them from another computer, or even put them into another NAS that uses a different RAID controller. If your NAS is a few years old, it might be very hard or impossible to find another NAS that can take your drives and still read your data. I read a review once where this happened, and the only way they could read the drives again was to get another NAS of exactly the same make and model to put the drives in. Hence, having a backup on standard drives with a common file format like NTFS is a really good idea !

[Baygolf]

Another good program to use to backup your Synology NAS is Synology's Hyperbackup software. This program will not only backup your data, but it can backup apps and setting used on your NAS.

[mrpeter]

The 3-2-1 backup rule states that we should always:
- Keep at least 3 copies of our data
- Keep that data on at least 2 different types of media
- Keep at least 1 of those media off-site



Data copy version 1 is on the Mac/PC: Synology NAS supports Apple Time Machine backups directly. For Windows-backup use Synology Active Backup for Business (this can also do bare-metal restores).

Data copy version 2 is now on the Synology NAS as a backup of data copy version 1. This is also a different media than the Mac/PC, so we now have at least 2 different types of media.

Data copy version 3 is the backup of the Synology NAS. This backup should be off-site, in case of a fire. It will be a manual task to keep it off-site if you use a USB-drive. If you do this let's say once a week, in case of a fire you could lose a week of data. Can your business survive this?

If you only have gigabytes of data on your Synology NAS, you can consider backup to a cloud storage provider via the Synology Cloud Sync application. Or Synology Hyper Backup application to Synology C2 cloud storage. But if you have terabytes of data, this solution may be too costly, and you should back up your Synology NAS to another Synology NAS placed off-site. For this, use the Synology Hyper Backup (Synology Hyper Backup Vault on the receiving NAS). If you have millions of files on your Synology NAS, the traditional backup with Hyper Backup may prove to slow, as it needs to scan for file changes. In this case, use the Synology Snapshot Replication instead (not supported on the cheapest NAS models). Also; hosting a receiving NAS for your clients could make you a profit.. ;-)

[raysrcsandtech]

Good video, I'm thinking about the Synology NAS I've just been using externals with CCC for years, love how CCC can detect which drive I plugged in and run the correct DATA backup i have set. My question is on the Synology it seems creating a "folder" then make that the share is the best way to go instead of creating "volumes" for each type of DATA for example I will create a "CCC" folder, "TimeMachine" folder and a "DATA" folder and have them as just 3 volumes I can see on the Mac finder side. It seems for Time Machine backup Synology does not recommend the folder is set as encrypted on the NAS side but encrypt the time machine backup on the Mac side when first created, thats fine, do you know if when I start using CCC can I have the folder "CCC" set as encrypted on the NAS side, does CCC care? I actually use a combination of Time machine and CCC for my backup schedules, rotated between about 6 externals and yes I'm also using the Seagate 8TB hub drives, they work great for this purpose.

[madvisakid]

When saving files to your Synology from your Mac what method do you use? Using a Mac Mini M1 I connect to my NAS using AFP via Finder, and find it very buggy. Like when browsing files it often just disconnects or I get the spinning beach ball and then finder loses it's connection to the NAS. It's not a problem I ever experience on PCs.

[stefanpangratz]

Nice video! Very informative. That's something I am looking to a while. Backuping my NAS.
Based on the Software information you gave, I guess you are backuping from the Macbook.
Does it male Sense to backup directly from the NAS?
Regards Stefan

[xyz]

All, I am planning to back up my 8TB NAS (RAID 1, 4TB + 4TB, both slots occupied) and I'm not sure what capacity of the external HDD should I choose . Should that be exactly 8TB or it can be though 4TB since it's RAID 1 config. ? Thank you for your feedback in advance!

[PolarRed]

Great Vid Art. Liked how you said, don't worry about speed.
Also, how often I have had to explain that a NAS is 1st stage storage, with redundancy (sometimes*) and not a backup! 
You've explained so much better than I could. Only thing I would add is, if you want to access your file directly from the Backup drive, don't do file encryption on the backup, that way you can just plug in the backup drive and go on any other OS, be it Mac or Windows.
*people never understand raid! "but I bought 2 HDs each at 1TB, i should have 2Tb! why do I only have 1?" I'm sure you've heard the same! hahaha

[qwertyqart]

What about FreeFileSync for Mac, worked for me well