I back up a lot of small data to Amazon Web Services.
Unfortunately, AWS can be a super expensive proposition for large amounts of data.
I have over 26 terabytes of media.
A combination of my PLEX library, family photos and videos, Geek Pub footage, and other random
things.
Putting that data on Amazon S3 would cost over $600 a month!
That's just not a good option.
I could put it Amazon Glacier or Blackblaze for about one quarter of that, but that's
still pushing $2000 a year.
So in talking to my brother, he offered to host a Synology at his house that I could
replicate over our VPN.
If you've not seen my video on VPN between friends and family you should check that out!
So on to Amazon I went and ordered a new Synology DS1618+ 6 bay NAS, four 14 terabyte Seagate
IronWolf Pro drives, a 10 gigabit capable network card, two sticks of 8GB DDR4, and
a dedicated UPS.
OK.
So some of you are probably asking right about now…
“Why the 10 gigabit network card when your are going to be syncing this over the internet?”
Well, that’s because I plan to sync this first at home over my 10 gig network.
So all 26 terabytes will sync over this 10 gig network card.
So then I will take it back out and take it to my brothers house and from there we only
have to sync changes.
This will take the initial replication of the Synology down from what could be weeks
or months down to just a few hours or maybe a day.
And so that’s why we’re going to do that.
Well let’s get started putting it all together!
First I started by removing the six case screws and removing the cover.
This exposes the PCIe slot.
I then gently inserted the 10G Tek network card and secured it in place with the latch
and screw.
Flipping the Synology upside down exposes the memory access panel.
Just remove two screws and the panel comes right off.
I replaced the factory 4GB card with two 8GB cards.
The Synology will complain on first boot that you’re not using official Synology RAM,
but after clicking OK everything will function just fine and at half the price of Synology’s
overpriced RAM.
Now it’s time to install the drives.
Synology uses screw less mounts so you just pop these little plastic rails off, insert
the drive, and then pop the rails back into place.
And just like that I have four drives ready to go into the new NAS.
Just slide them in one at a time and latch the locking lever.
Synology really makes this a simple task.
Since I don’t have any fiber cables free I just used the Copper 10 GB SFP+ to connect
it to my lab switch.
And after plugging in the power the Synology comes to life and is ready to be configured!
To configure the Synology just open a browser and go to find.synology.com.
After a few seconds you’ll be presented with a link to connect to your new Synology.
Click the connect button, agree to the legal garbage, and then click on the setup button
to start the process.
Once the installation of Disk Station Manager starts its a good time to go grab a beer.
This will take a few minutes.
I’ve sped up the video to save you some time.
After the Synology reboots, you’ll be prompted to enter a name for your Synology, along with
choosing a username and password.
You can pretty much click skip on every screen that follows until you land on the DSM desktop.
At this point its time to open Storage Manager.
I just dragged it to the desktop for future quick access.
First thing I need to do is create a new storage pool.
I selected RAID 5, and all the defaults since I am using all of my drives for this pool.
After creating the storage pool, I need to create a volume on the pool.
Again selecting all of the defaults because I am using the entire storage pool for one
volume.
After that the Synology will go to work provisioning the disks!
With that complete, I took the Synology upstairs along with the UPS, and sat it on a temporary
table in my server closet.
I plugged it in to a free 10 gig port on my Unifi XG-16, powered on the UPS and then powered
on the Synology.
And it's all ready for the initial sync as soon as the RAID scrubbing finishes, which
should complete overnight.
My precious… oh!
Hey!
Uh so its about 16 hours later and the scrubbing process is complete.
So let’s walk over to the bench and talk about it.
OK.
So as mentioned it took about 16 hours to complete data scrubbing on this set of disks.Now
that number can vary wildly depending upon which drives you buy, how fast they are, which
Synology you bought, what the processor is on it, and there's also settings that you
can tweak with in the Synology to make it go faster or slower and I had those set to
the absolute limit to go as fast as I possibly could go because I wanted to get moving with
this project.
With that said a lot of you might be asking “okay well can't you go ahead and start
the synchronization process before that scrubbing finishes?” and the answer is absolutely
you can!
But I chose not to for a couple of reasons.
Number one I want to make sure these drives were good I didn’t want to get you know
halfway through the replication process only to find out that I've got a bunch of bad sectors
on one of these desks and I need to return it and get a new one.
The second reason is that scrubbing process takes a lot!
Even on the lowest settings it takes a lot of CPU power and it takes a lot of performance
away from the device and so when I do the replication I want it to run at full speed
so I can figure out what the baseline is for this box and tell you guys!
And so I wanted to make sure that the box is idle up until the point that we start the
replication process.
And so with all of that I'll plug it back into the network power it back up and we'll
install Synology Replication Services and get the replication started!
To install replication and snapshot services just go to the package manager and install
Snapshot Replication.
This will install both the Snapshot Service and Replication Service all at once.
It takes about a minute or so for the Synology to download, install, and start this service.
This package should be installed on both the sending and receiving Synology.
Open the app on both of the Synologys just to make sure everything works and the services
are started.
On the sending Synology I opened the Snapshot Replication app and click the create button.
On next screen I’ll select Remote and then click next again.
Here, I’ll enter the DNS name of my new NAS, along with a username and password.
I created a special service account for replication that only has access to run this job.
Also in today’s world I highly recommend you select to enable encryption.
Next, we’re asked which volume to snapshot too.
We only created a single volume, so Volume 1 it is.
And then we’re asked which shares we want to replicate.
I am going replicate three folders.
My Plex library, my Medial Hold where I do my video editing, and my general files share.
Next I need to tell the Synology that we’re going to send the initial replication over
the network, rather than a USB drive (aka sneaker net).
Then here I select the replication to update on a schedule, once daily at 3AM.
And lastly I tell it what time to do the grooming process.
I picked 10AM each morning.
And after clicking Apply and waiting a minute, the initial replication kicks off.
After a few seconds you’ll be able to see some basic information on the replication
status, including the job percentage complete, the current transfer speed, and jobs in queue.
If we look at control panel on the receiving NAS you’ll see all three shares have been
created automatically.
back on the sending Synology if you click any job and then the info button you can see
all the details of the replication progress.
This is super handy.
I averaged between 200 megabytes and 300 megabytes per second for most of the copy, but it really
slowed down when processing tons of smaller files.
And after about 36 hours the initial replication completed, and you can see all the folders
show success!
So with everything all synced up, I loaded up the new Synology, and headed over to my
brother’s house!
David quickly got to work unpacking the Synology and getting it all ready to go in its new
home.
He made a spot in his network closet that’s a perfect fit, right next to his own Synology.
Under the table he installed the dedicated UPS on this little custom shelf.
Neat.
With everything plugged in we powered on the Synology and let the bits start flowing!
OK!
Well now I have all of my data off site.
I feel so much better now!
There's a few things that I wanted to talk to you about before we end this video.
The first one is... a lot of you are probably wondering why I decided to have the Synology
replicate at 3 AM rather than just continuously replicate and there's really a couple of good
reasons for that.
The first one is most of you who watched our VPN between friends and family video know
that David's internet connection is pretty terrible.
At least compared to what most of us have in this area of the United States and so the
last thing I wanted to do was like drop 25 gigs of video that I've been editing on my
NAS right at the time that you know David is trying to stream Netflix and swamp his
bandwidth.
If I'm copying files over and that happens at 3 a.m. when you're asleep, no big deal
no one will even notice.
The second reason though actually might surprise you and it's for security reasons.
And so let's say that I was to accidentally get some kind of malware that does some kind
of ransomware or cryptolocker or something like that on my NAS and if I'm replicating
everything immediately and you know as it changes then I'm going to immediately start
replicating all of that damage off-site and so not only will my on-site files be locked
so will all of my off-site files.
And so if you have them set on a delay then it gives you plenty of time if something goes
seriously wrong to stop that replication before it gets off-site.
And so that's the reason that we chose to do that.
The other thing that you might ask is why did I do the memory upgrade if it's just going
to be an off-site replicated Synology and it doesn't really do anything else.
There's a couple reasons.
RAM these days is just incredibly cheap.
I think I spent $28 on Amazon for those sticks of RAM.
So kind of why not right?
But also because it gives me the option (and I'd actually did install It off video) I didn't
show this on video I actually installed Synology’s virtual machine manager.
And so I did install Windows 10 and Ubuntu on that server... or sorry on that Synology.
So now I have the option.
Sometimes you know that the File Station Manager that is within DSM is just not all of that
feature rich and so having a full Windows 10 box or Ubuntu box that I can use to manipulate
files and things like that quickly with scripts or Powershell or something like that is really
nice to have.
I’ll keep them powered off like 99% of the time but they're always there if I need them.
And so that about wraps up this video!
Thank you guys so much for watching if you want to leave a comment you can do that below
or tell me I did it all wrong.
:-) I'll see you in the next video!