As many of you have noticed via Twitter, I’ve still been searching for and evaluating various
off-site, or remote, backup solutions for my business data.
I have tens of terabytes of video footage and various assets and your standard cloud
storage services aren’t going to cut it.
Since I’ve been working with Synology on my in-office storage solutions, they wanted
me to check out their new C2 Backup service integrated into their NAS operating system
and sponsor another tutorial.
They even have a 30-day trial available!
Let’s give it a look.
Thanks to Western Digital for sponsoring this NAS build and my overall storage solutions
with their WD Red 6 Terabyte network storage drives, which are made to last for a very
long time with constant uptime.
And they keep your data safe, and they still delivery it fast from your storage solution.
Check WD out via the link in the video description.
Synology C2 Backup is a cost-effective integrated cloud backup solution for your Synology NAS.
By being integrated into your NAS, it’s easy to use and their data center located
in Frankfurt meets the high privacy standards required by EU regulations.
You can schedule your backups, maintain versioned file history, and recover it with multiple
methods.
Let’s see how to set it up.
You can install Synology C2 through the Hyper Backup package in Package Manager.
Install the Hyper Backup utility and run it.
Once it open, you’ll be prompted with the “Backup Wizard” - also accessible by clicking
the Plus in the bottom left-hand corner and hitting “Data Backup Task.”
Here you can choose to back up to a variety of cloud services, including manual rsync
settings.
Here we will select “Synology C2 cloud backup” and hit next.
This will prompt you to log in to your Synology account.
Then you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.
Next, you’ll be prompted with the available plans for their backup - starting at 100GB
for only 10 Euros per year up to your own custom number of terabytes with a scalable
price.
Choose your plan, hit next, and enter your payment information.
This is a trial that requires payment information, but you can cancel at any time prior to the
auto-renewal - so just make sure you put in a calendar reminder to cancel if you decide
you wish to not use this service.
Once you’ve finished signing up, you’ll be brought back to the DiskStation Manager
operating system to name the directory that your new backup task will upload to on the
cloud.
Name it, if desired, and hit Next.
Choose your desired directories to back up to the C2 Cloud service.
Hit Next when ready.
If there’s any application-based data on this NAS that you wish to back up, select
it as well, and hit Next.
Now you have some options for the backup task.
Name of the task, notifications of its status, a bandwidth cap to keep it from bottlenecking
your network, a schedule for backing up and verifying the integrity of the data, as well
as client-side encryption.
Choose your settings and hit Apply.
The client-side encryption option is probably a good choice for the more security-minded
of you out there, especially if you're uploading sensitive data to a cloud service.
This will allow you to set up your own encryption key, and keep all of your data completely
encrypted so that neither Synology, nor anyone who broke into Synology's service (should
that be something that would happen) could see your data.
Only you with your key.
That being said, your data can't be recovered if you lose your encryption key.
But if you're already really focused on security, you're probably going to keep up with it anyway.
And this works with all of the Hyper Backup options, all of the different cloud storage
options available in Hyper Backup.
This isn't specific to C2 Backup, this is available for all of the Hyper Backup options.
Once complete, it will ask if you wish to back up now.
If you choose No, it will wait until the scheduled time slot.
I said yes.
Now it will upload your data.
Once the data upload is complete, you have some options available to you.
You can trigger another round of backups now if needed, or view the Backup Explorer, which
gives you a tree of your backed up files, as well as a timeline to see the different
versions and points in time that files were backed up.
You can also view some backup statistics, such as when files were added, modified or
deleted, or the size of your source backup folders.
You can also go in and edit your backup task schedule or folders, view a history of backup
actions, or add a new backup task altogether.
The Backup Explorer can also be accessed from the Synology web portal for your NAS or from
the HyperBackupExplorer desktop program for Windows, Mac and Linux, so that’s handy.
This is an important overall feature of the service - is you don’t need the NAS to restore
your data.
Also, their deduplication and compression tools help save on costs, and it’s all through
one vendor contact for your NAS and service, as well.
Synology C2 is a great backup tool that allows you to take full advantage of the 3-2-1 backup
strategy.
Which means having 3 copies of your important data, 2 are local, so on the actual operating
computer that you're running with and then backed up to your NAS, and then one that is
off-site.
Such as on a cloud service, or Synology C2 Backup.
That way it's all running through the same setup.
This makes it super easy, super straightforward, and integrates, theoretically with your existing
backup solutions.
That's pretty cool.
If you want to check it out for yourself, just install Hyper Backup in your Synology
NAS or check out the link in the video description.
Down there you’ll find the like button, as well as a button to subscribe for more
educational tech content.
I’m EposVox here to make tech easier and more fun, and I’ll see you next time.