Synology stretches into a backup appliance, with object stores to come

Taiwanese storage vendor Synology has revealed a range of backup appliances. For years it has sold NAS devices that include a hypervisor and modest processing capacity. That combo has been suggested as not-quite hyperconverged infrastructure, but instead a handy way to run a few modest VMs in small offices. Curiously, …

[zipityzi]

Active Backup is one of the least reliable, most finicky backup suites I’ve used. Well, backing up was easy. Restoring was a nightmare: nonsense criteria restrictions (even on the same hardware), convoluted driver backup with incomplete drivers in their PE environment, and incomprehensible error codes.

I used it on DSM 7.1 & 7.2 for two weeks, stress testing its backup & restore process. I felt like they’d borrowed Microsoft’s 2010-era disk imaging platform with how incomplete it was.

Just read Synology’s own docs to see how finicky it is.

I’ve seen too many YouTube influencers peddling it, without making a serious comparison to veteran SME / SMB backup platforms.

I’d much rather point people to Veeam, Macrium, Nakivo, etc.

Active Backup for Business, I fear, is ”free” for a reason, like much else first-party apps in Synology’s Package Center: barely supported, looks pretty and useful on the surface, and full of annoying or fatal restrictions that other vendors fixed and improved decades ago.

I don’t mean to be overly harsh, but so much feels like abandonware that was developed to “fill a niche, poorly, but just check off the box.”

Maybe with this new push, Synology will take it more seriously. But I doubt it: ABB has shown little improvement in years.

[noisy_typist]

The most recent kernel version supported for Linux is 5.15 (October 2021), and the mac client never really worked so I would tend to agree that it is currently abandonware.

It's a shame because the UI is nice, and it feels like something a batteries included NAS should offer.

[Lazlo Woodbine]

I've not used Synology kit in a while.

I used to sell a lot of their NAS units for use with small CCTV systems, the NVR software built into the units was a huge cost saving for a lot of my customers.

Although it wasn't so good when one customer tried to scale it up to a whole town centre with 50 HD cameras attempting to record to a single RAID 5 target.