Last year we had the notion to change our backup “software”, we had been using a backup appliance and it was more than a bit old so while our environment has grown the device hasn’t. After a bit of looking around at the standard players, Barracuda, Veeam etc. someone mentioned Synology. If you have never checked them our, do it, right here, I’ll wait.
After checking out the online I talked to my sales person and got a DiskStation RS815+ on loan for a month or so. More “or so” than anything because I never returned it. I ended up having a talk with some reps from Synology and they said flat out that this software was free and going to stay that way for the foreseeable future. Apparently they want folks to use their hardware so they offer the software as an incentive.
On to the basics of the software.
There are 3 modes of use depending on what you have and how you need to back it up:
- Physical Server – uses a software client installed on the box
- Virtual Machine – Connects to the VM Host
- File Server – Connects to the file shares
All of these have their place and believe it or not, due to my environment, I use them all. To be fair, there is another option called “PC” but in my environment that is fairly pointless so on we go. So, starting from the ground up I ran into a couple issues with things and had to make a compromise here and there but nothing I couldn’t live with. Due to the fact that I have some 2003 servers (I hear the snickering in the background) I needed to do a few extra VM conversions to get a nice clean backup option but in 2019 having to keep something older like that around, these things are expected.
I am running VMware, on top of that I have ESX STD servers and a straggler ESXi box with a couple old school archive type boxes on it but thankfully that doesn’t really matter. Setting up the Synology it can access and backup both the paid and free licenses but, you need to be mindful and add your CBT entry on the machine. When it comes to the Physical Servers I was thrilled to see that I didn’t need a reboot to install the software, it just works. The catch I had there was at one point last year I ended up changing out and getting a bigger Synology unit with redundant power etc. and these Physical Machines needed to have the client removed and reinstalled to re-point them. Again, no restarts were necessary but it would have been nice to just login to a client and change the info.
Active Backup for Business has a very smooth restore portal. Seriously, this it one of the easiest I have ever used in the last 20 years, there is seriously nothing bad I can say about it. That being said there is a recommendation I have. If you are going to go with this type of setup spend a little extra cash and load out the RAM on the box. If load up the RAM then you can install the Synology Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) and that gives you the option to spin up your backed up machines right on the Synology device. You might think that you would never use it but I tell you, I spin up a machine every few months because someone needs something, especially is they are looking for something SQL. When it comes to that I can spin up the machine and actually login to it and query SQL, which we have actually had a need for a few times, and it so much easier than having to actually restore a DB anywhere.
All in all, for the price tag (which was the cheapest around) this backup solution starts off great and only gets better when you add features and other options. Seeing as how those other options are free just like the backup software, you can’t really go wrong.
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