brandonkick
Well-Known Member
- Reaction score
- 859
Right now I have a setup at my part time job where a Synology DS415+ (4x2TB WD REDs in Raid 10) is used as a "backup machine".
Their are roughly 15-20 devices set up to backup the users documents and desktop folders to the synology as well as a few dedicated share directories for things like "accounting dept" and "drafting department".
The DS415+ sits on the network, and nightly I have SyncBackFree do backups from each workstation to the Synology. The Synology also has a pair of identical external USB hard drives that it backs up to every day. Each day the USB drive gets swapped out, taken home, and the other one gets plugged in to the Synology.
I don't like this really. There are a few reasons.
1) The DS415+ and it's disks are a little more than 3 years old at this point.
2) With a single DS415+, if anything were to happen, there would likely be pretty significant downtime. Unless it were as simple as the power supply needing replaced (pending we had one on hand)... but if there were something that required a restore/reconfig.... it potentially could be hours and hours best case if not a day or two until it were fully back up.
3) The External USB drive will not get swapped out from time to time. So the one that is taken home with the office manager could potentially be a few days out of date. I don't know that it happens often, but it's just another variable I'd rather not have.
4) Sometimes SyncBack screws up. Various issues, two biggest being some times the scheduled task images gets corrupted and the backups stop running on that machine. Also, sometimes it randomly stops backing up certain files for whatever reason.
Just today I got to thinking I'd be better off doing some type of folder redirection instead of this backup setup. So I got to playing around, researching, and trying things and found that I could simply right click a folder, go down to properties, go to the location tab, and then browse to a synology directory that a user has access to. So I tested it out on a workstation, and got both the desktop and documents folder redirected to that users synology directory. Works pretty well... had a tiny bit of a strange issue where not all shortcuts were copying to the redirected location but I found if I made copies of those on the local desktop they appeared in the redirect location.. then I just deleted the "original" shortcuts. Problem solved and now both of these directories are living on the Synology. No need to worry about SyncBack failing or having some weird problem.
This creates one new issue though, now the Synology is a single point of failure. If it goes down, all users go down (or atleast their redirected folders do). That is, as far as I know anyway. If that were to happen in my scenario, would their folders revert back to the default locations? Will they be "missing" data if they do that (basically would the default locations only contain what they had when the redirect was set up?) This bothers me.
To solve that issue, I'm thinking about getting a second Synology NAS to configure as a "backup / failover" but I'm not sure how easy that is to do. My goal is to have two Synology units in SHA mode, so if one fails the other takes over as active in about a min or so. I'm just wondering how nicely the folder redirection would play with that... since the failover device is different than the one that redirection was set up for. I tend to think that in "failover" the redirection that is configured on the workstations may not work... since Synology1 was the original mapping and Synology2 is now active. Or does the SHA mode make the synology units true clones of each other?
In order to do this, would I need another 415+ or could I go with something newer so long as it was at least 4 bays and had the same disk configuration (capacity / arrangements / geometry)?
Is their a better way to do folder redirection than the way I'm describing?
What have you all experienced as the best way to prepare for and recover from a Synology "disaster"? Can you do a backup in a sense that not only are you backing up all the data, but also the units configuration?
Their are roughly 15-20 devices set up to backup the users documents and desktop folders to the synology as well as a few dedicated share directories for things like "accounting dept" and "drafting department".
The DS415+ sits on the network, and nightly I have SyncBackFree do backups from each workstation to the Synology. The Synology also has a pair of identical external USB hard drives that it backs up to every day. Each day the USB drive gets swapped out, taken home, and the other one gets plugged in to the Synology.
I don't like this really. There are a few reasons.
1) The DS415+ and it's disks are a little more than 3 years old at this point.
2) With a single DS415+, if anything were to happen, there would likely be pretty significant downtime. Unless it were as simple as the power supply needing replaced (pending we had one on hand)... but if there were something that required a restore/reconfig.... it potentially could be hours and hours best case if not a day or two until it were fully back up.
3) The External USB drive will not get swapped out from time to time. So the one that is taken home with the office manager could potentially be a few days out of date. I don't know that it happens often, but it's just another variable I'd rather not have.
4) Sometimes SyncBack screws up. Various issues, two biggest being some times the scheduled task images gets corrupted and the backups stop running on that machine. Also, sometimes it randomly stops backing up certain files for whatever reason.
Just today I got to thinking I'd be better off doing some type of folder redirection instead of this backup setup. So I got to playing around, researching, and trying things and found that I could simply right click a folder, go down to properties, go to the location tab, and then browse to a synology directory that a user has access to. So I tested it out on a workstation, and got both the desktop and documents folder redirected to that users synology directory. Works pretty well... had a tiny bit of a strange issue where not all shortcuts were copying to the redirected location but I found if I made copies of those on the local desktop they appeared in the redirect location.. then I just deleted the "original" shortcuts. Problem solved and now both of these directories are living on the Synology. No need to worry about SyncBack failing or having some weird problem.
This creates one new issue though, now the Synology is a single point of failure. If it goes down, all users go down (or atleast their redirected folders do). That is, as far as I know anyway. If that were to happen in my scenario, would their folders revert back to the default locations? Will they be "missing" data if they do that (basically would the default locations only contain what they had when the redirect was set up?) This bothers me.
To solve that issue, I'm thinking about getting a second Synology NAS to configure as a "backup / failover" but I'm not sure how easy that is to do. My goal is to have two Synology units in SHA mode, so if one fails the other takes over as active in about a min or so. I'm just wondering how nicely the folder redirection would play with that... since the failover device is different than the one that redirection was set up for. I tend to think that in "failover" the redirection that is configured on the workstations may not work... since Synology1 was the original mapping and Synology2 is now active. Or does the SHA mode make the synology units true clones of each other?
In order to do this, would I need another 415+ or could I go with something newer so long as it was at least 4 bays and had the same disk configuration (capacity / arrangements / geometry)?
Is their a better way to do folder redirection than the way I'm describing?
What have you all experienced as the best way to prepare for and recover from a Synology "disaster"? Can you do a backup in a sense that not only are you backing up all the data, but also the units configuration?
Last edited: