- If you're like me,
you have a ton of digital data,
and it just keeps expanding every year.
You probably have a bunch of photos of family and friends.
And then there's digital documents,
school papers, work files,
resumes, tax returns,
and of course,
that giant library of "legally" acquired movies
that you still haven't watched.
Your data may live on a Mac
or multiple Macs,
and maybe it's in the cloud.
Backing up all of that data can be a bit of a hassle,
and you may not know where to start.
So, today we're going to look at how a Synology NAS
can help keep your data safe.
Hey, I'm Jerry,
and many years ago I was hit by a Trojan horse virus
that destroyed a bunch of my data.
Since then, I've been a bit of a freak
about having multiple backups,
and have my backups in multiple locations.
I currently have a big convoluted process of making sure all
of my important stuff is backed up
and in multiple places,
but this video is going to focus specifically
on the different ways that a Synology NAS can assist
with backing up your Macs.
First off, you may be asking yourself,
"What is a Synology?"
Or, "What is a NAS?"
NAS stands for Network Attached Storage,
and the simplest way to think about it
is that it's an external drive
that connects to your network.
Instead of a USB drive sitting next to
and plugged directly into your computer,
a NAS will connect to the ethernet to your router
or switch, and then it's available to all of the devices
on your network.
This is great for a home with multiple devices
or computers that need to access the same files
or a backup location.
Synology makes a number of different NAS boxes,
ranging in size
and price to fit multiple needs.
You can get one for as low as $99
that holds a single hard drive,
but at a bare minimum,
for redundancy you really should get one
with at least two drives.
And that will run somewhere around $160.
This will allow you to add two drives for redundancy,
so if one of the drives fails,
you won't lose your data.
At current prices,
you can get a one terabyte NAS drive for about $59.
So with the two drive Synology DS220j,
and two Seagate one terabyte NAS drives,
you're looking at around $280.
Now I know that sounds expensive,
but it's really nothing
compared to what you might go through emotionally
if you lose your data.
If you need more storage because you have a lot of files,
or you have more than a couple of computers,
then you can also go with bigger drives,
or even a bigger NAS with four
or six drive bays.
Okay, with that explanation out of the way,
I wanna talk about the different ways
that you can back up your Mac
or Mac's with a Synology NAS.
There are a few different options to choose from,
and you can do more than one if you want for different needs
or different data types.
The different options will range in configuration levels,
but Synology's DSM
or Disc Station Manager
is an extremely user-friendly operating system.
And the documentation on their website
is very easy to follow.
The first way that you can back up your Macs
with this Synology is with Time Machine.
Yeah, that backup software
Apple's built into the Mac since 2009.
The whole thing just works the exact same.
And for the most part,
it looks the exact same for better or worse.
To use time machine with Synology,
you need to make sure that you have
a few things configured first.
After you have your user created,
and a folder shared,
you need to go to Control Panel,
File Services, over to Advanced.
And you need to enable Bonjour service delivery.
And then you also need to enable this box down here,
enable Bonjour Time Machine broadcast to be via SMB.
When that's done,
click on Set Time Machine Folders.
And here's where you're gonna select that folder
you already created.
Click apply and apply
and you should be set.
This video is not going to be able to cover all of the steps
of getting the Synology up
and running, but be sure to let me know in the comments
if that's something you want me to make a video on
in the future.
So to configure Time Machine to use that Synology
as the backup destination,
we're going to System Preferences,
down to Time Machine.
Click on Select Backup Disc.
And here we should see that folder that we shared out
from the Synology
and enabled for Time Machine backups.
Click that and use disc.
it's going to connect.
And then it's going to ask us for the username
and password that has access to that folder on the Synology.
So we'll type that in here
and click connect.
And there we go.
So now we are configured to use the Synology
for the backups of this Mac.
And this is going to start the backups in just a moment.
And now's a good time to click this box down here
that says Show Time Machine in menu bar.
Which will place the icon at the top
where you can actually use it to enter Time Machine
which we'll look at in just a minute
and then also get to the settings
and then you can tell it to back up now,
which we'll go ahead and do.
Now what's gonna happen is this first backup
is going to back up your entire computer.
And that's gonna take a long time,
especially if you're on a wireless network.
Now this could take hours
or even a day,
or even more depending on the amount of data you have.
So what I recommend is inside System Preferences,
I'm sorry, System Settings,
go to battery
or energy settings
and make sure that your computer is not set to go to sleep
so that your full backup can actually complete.
Now no backups actually matter
unless you can actually restore from it.
So let's test it.
So to restore with Time Machine,
you can just go into any folder
and we're going to use this 347.MP4 file as an example.
So we're going to delete the file.
And then we're going to go up to the Time Machine menu bar
and here we can enter Time Machine.
And because we have this folder open,
it's going to enter Time Machine right from this window.
So we get that familiar interface.
And of course,
we can choose any previous backups.
So we'll just go to the most recent one.
And what you're gonna see here is sometimes a bit of a delay
when using a network location for your Time Machine backups.
This can take a little while,
I've seen it take up to a minute
or two before it actually loads the data.
And that's just part of backing up with Time Machine
over a network.
So that actually took about 60 seconds.
And you can see our previous backup time here
and we can see down here we're connected to our NAS.
So we're going to select that 347 file
and hit restore.
And just as you would expect,
that restore did finish,
but my screen recording cut out so I lost that part of it.
Using Time Machine with the Synology is a great option.
Which is easy to set up
and you can just let it run
and backup your entire computer.
The way Time Machine works with creating sparse images
can be a little bit slow over the network at times.
And I've seen reports of Time Machine sometimes
saying it needed to restart the entire backup process
and redo your whole backup set.
I haven't seen these issues myself,
but I just wanted to mention that.
Next up, we have Synology Drive,
which is actually two backup solutions in one app.
First, Synology Drive can be a file backup utility
that's a little more customizable than Time Machine
and in my experience a bit faster.
For this you need to install Synology Drive,
which is in the Package Center of the Synology.
And Package Center is really just like
the app store for Synology.
It's completely free
and you can just go ahead
and search Synology Drive,
find it, and then you should be able to go ahead.
I'm sorry, Synology Drive Server.
And then you should be able to install it from here.
When that's completed,
it's going to create a folder
inside your Synology called Homes.
And then inside there,
you're going to have a home folder
created for each user that has a user account
on the Synology.
Again, there are a few more steps to this process
but we're not gonna get into it in this video.
Let me know below if you wanna see it in the future.
After installing the Synology Drive software
on the computer,
we can go ahead
and create a backup task.
And here we're going to type in our quick connect name
and username and password for our user folder
on the Synology.
And click next.
So here's where we can actually select the folders
that we want to back up.
Unlike Time Machine,
which actually backs up your entire computer by default,
we can be more specific about which folders
we want to back up.
For this demonstration,
I'm just going to select that desktop folder
which encompasses that same set of files
that we looked at before.
We'll click next.
Now you have options here.
You can do a continuous backup,
which is going to monitor these locations.
And any time a file has changed
or updated, say you're working on a word document
and you save it.
And each time you save it,
it's going to back up a new copy of it.
Manual backup is only going to run when you actually
click the button to run the backup.
And scheduled backup is where you can set a schedule
to run every hour like Time Machine does,
or once a day,
or once every four hours,
whatever you like.
So we'll go ahead
and check that real quick.
We'll do schedule a backup,
we'll do daily,
we'll just do every hour just like Time Machine does.
And we'll hit next.
And that's just the summary of the backup information done.
And now it says,
"Do you wanna backup test now?"
So we'll back it up
and let that run real fast.
So you can see real quick that it's running
through the seven files
or so that's in this files folder on the desktop.
And that'll take just a few minutes to actually go through
and finish the backup.
All right. So the backup has been completed.
And just like before,
we're going to delete that 347.MP4 file.
And we're gonna go back to the Synology Drive.
We're going to click on restore.
And here's where we can see the list of files.
So you can scroll down
or dive down into these folders
and you can see the previous files that were backed up.
And of course,
you can go back to a specific date
and time to whenever you think you might've lost a file.
But since we only have one backup at this time,
we're going to click on the file
and we're gonna click Restore.
And this is actually going to complete much faster
than the Time Machine restore did.
It didn't take any time to actually
load up the previous files
and it's taken much less time to actually do the restore.
And it's complete.
So we can see there over here in the files folder,
we have our 347 file.
The next option is we can actually set up a sync task
which creates a folder called Synology Drive
or whatever you wanna name it,
where just like any folder on your Mac
or even other cloud sync folders like iCloud
or OneDrive,
you can drag files to it
or save files from any application.
Those files will automatically sync in the background
from the Mac to the Synology NAS
and then to any other computer that you have
Synology Drive actually installed on.
So to set up a sync task it's pretty easy.
We'll go to sync tasks,
create sync task
and it already sees that we're connected
because we set up the backup task,
but otherwise you would just set the same information.
You would put the quick connect ID
and your username and password.
We're going to sync a folder in My Drive
and here's where you can select the name
and location of the folders on both the Synology
and on your MacBook.
So we're going to edit the one on the Synology real quick
and we're just going to create a new folder under My Drive.
So this is all the stuff that's already there.
Just under My Drive we're gonna create a new folder
called Synology Drive
and that's where that's going to live.
And then on the Mac it's Users/jerry/Synology Drive
and that works just fine.
So click done
and it's going to configure that folder for us.
And now we should be able to find that
if we go to our home folder.
I now have a Synology Drive folder sitting right here.
And with this,
I can actually just drag files directly in here
and what's gonna happen.
Oops. I actually wanna copy that into there.
And what's gonna happen is
this file is now going to sync back to the Synology Drive.
So now if we open up the files on the Synology,
we should be able to see that file that just
synced over there.
And we'll go down to Jerry,
Drive, Synology Drive
and there's that file.
Now, the restore process for Synology Drive
is a little bit different.
You have to go into the file system
on the web part of the Synology
and actually see the different versions there.
So let me show you that just real quick.
The easiest way to get there is to go to
the Synology Drive icon,
click down here,
and we're going to log in to the Synology.
And from here,
you can see your files that you've backed up.
We'll go to Synology Drive.
And if this was a text document
or something that had multiple versions,
I'd be able to select it
and right click it
and hit version history.
And here I would see a list of the different versions
that were available for every change
that I made to the file.
And to download it,
you could just simply click this menu over here
and click download.
And that will download whichever version of the file
that you think works best.
So those are the three ways that you can back up data
from your Mac
or Macs, to a Synology NAS.
Time Machine is probably the easiest way,
because half of the software is already just built
into Mac OS
and you just need to configure a couple of things
on the Synology itself.
The Synology Drive sync is also a great option
if you just wanna have a folder
and manually decide what you want to keep in it.
But I think for me personally,
I prefer the backup job built into Synology Drive.
This gives you easy control over specific folders
or even files that you wanna back up
and you can set it on a schedule that works
or makes sense for you.
No matter which option you choose,
or options because you can use any of those
or any combination of them together,
having a reliable backup
and tested restore solution
should be one of your top priorities.
Because you just never know when something could happen
to that important document
or treasured photos.
Of course, this is only the first step
in a comprehensive backup strategy
that I hope to get into in another video.
So I hope this was helpful as a good start.
But until then,
you should definitely check out this random video,
right over here.
It's a good one.
Hit the thumbs up button if you liked it.
Hit subscribe if you want
and I'll see you next time.
(serene music)