Dumb Synology NAS question

[rfisher]

My 9 year old LG NAS is only seeing bay 2 HDD so it's getting binned.

Bought a nice new shiny Synology NAS to replace it.

However, things have clearly moved on in the last 9 years as the Synology is brimmng with apps and seems very determined to get me to set it up to back itself up to anyone and everyone on the web who runs a Cloud service.

That's all well and good, but so far I haven't managed to get a single file from my laptop backed up to the NAS.

The LG came with a backup programme (not an app) which I ran on my laptop and sorted on the fly backup.

I have no idea how to get a similar arrangement to work with the Synology.

So I'm asking clever people on a well known car forum to kindly assist me.

Ta.

[xeny]

I think this will do what you want

https://www.synology.com/en-uk/knowledgebase/DSM/h...

It's a package for the Synology and a programme for your laptop.

[rfisher]

Thanks.

Doesn't seem to do 'on the fly' and incremental backup.

Maybe NAS are just designed to shove all your data to 3rd party cloud servers these days.

Why not make them diskless in that case?

I'm tempted to try to fix my LG unit.

[Brainpox]

rfisher said:

Thanks.

Doesn't seem to do 'on the fly' and incremental backup.

Maybe NAS are just designed to shove all your data to 3rd party cloud servers these days.

Why not make them diskless in that case?

I'm tempted to try to fix my LG unit.

The gold standard is to have local and remote backups.

If you send everything to the cloud and lose the password then you've lost your data.

If you only store locally and have a disk failure/your house burns down then you've lost everything.

Now I don't use Windows but it sounds like the functionality you want is built in? https://lifehacker.com/how-to-back-up-your-compute...

[thebraketester]

As above. The cloud station app is the one your are after. I have not tried it so can my help regarding the way it works. Should be easy to setup though.

[rfisher]

OK thanks.

Got this working now using windows backup and restore.

Set the network drive as \\Your_NAS_Name\Your_Backup_Folder

Can be scheduled to backup when you want.

Also found this list of 3rd party software that you can use for backups

https://www.synology.com/en-uk/knowledgebase/DSM/t...

I'll look into offsite backup later.

[xeny]

rfisher said:

Doesn't seem to do 'on the fly' and incremental backup.

.

I don't use it myself (first rule of recommending something) as I use my Synology as a network file server and then replicate it off site to another Synology, but looking at https://www.synology.com/en-uk/knowledgebase/DSM/h... it looks as if will do a continuous sync and keep previous versions, which should have the effect you want, or am I missing something?

[rfisher]

Thanks - that does look like the sort of thing I'm after.

I'll have a bit more of a play with the app after my Windows backup has finished.

[stemll]

I have never "backed up" laptops to the NAS, I simply don't store files on the laptops at all.

If I create a file, I save it direct to a folder on the NAS which is a mapped drive on the laptop. Each of us has a separate folder mapped. Why clutter a small laptop drive when I have an always-on network drive with terabytes of space? Laptop drive used for temporary files or anything I want offline. Works for us and no reliance on any apps, no risk of anything being interrupted by laptop or NAS being shut down.

The NAS then backs itself up every night to AWS and I have a USB drive in my desk at work that is updated monthly.