Synology BeeStation review: A great way to start getting real about backups
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
That's simply untrue. Your annoyance with what is vs isn't does not affect truth.
You can say, for example, that a nearline-style checkpoint/snapshot of your data is a "backup" and that'd be colloquially forgivable, but "colloquially forgivable" is not "technically correct."
Your on-box snapshots won't help you if your home (where the NAS we're talking about is ostensibly located) burns down, or if someone breaks in and steals your NAS. Backups must by definition be recoverable in what's commonly called the "smoking hole" scenario, where the primary location is reduced to a smoking hole in the ground by a fire or an asteroid or whatever.
This is why you'll hear "nerds" say things like "RAID is not a backup," and "checkpoints are not a backup." They're not. You can rage that words don't mean what you want them to mean—and I'd normally be right there with you, because linguistic prescriptivism is evil and stupid—but in this case, it turns out that common usage really does reflect the correct definition.
If there's solace to take here, it's that a lot of very smart people have thought about these things for a long time, and there really are best practices to adhere to when backing up data. This is a good thing. You're free to do you when it comes to your own data, but don't try to play the "hurp durp words can mean what I want" card in this particular case. You're dead-ass wrong, and there's a mountain of learned experience out there for you to examine if you want detailed explanations why.
(The problem might be that I'm one of the "nerds" you're calling out, but as a former enterprise architect responsible for the lifecycle of hundreds of PB, I am confident that I know more about this issue than you do. Bring the slings and arrows, I can take them.)
Upvote
6
(10
/
-4)
Well, they tried to introduce the AI driven Recall recently that'd back up literally abso-****ing-lutely everything one ever did, ever, probably with a cloud data store involved too!
Presumably for people who care, they've picked up some backup software or like a lot of people gone and bought a NAS box to do it for them.
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
That's fair enough. I recognize I'm dealing with a relatively small sample size. It's important to note, though, unless you're extremely careful about contact details, they probably know who you are, too, which may skew your experience somewhat. It's a little like how I share a name with a major political donor ion my state and when I call my elected officials, I sometimes get put right through because staff assumes I'm a major donor. That shouldn't happen but it does.
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
That's the first I've encountered such a claim. Do you have a source for this?
Upvote
0
(2
/
-2)
SHR works well in my experience on 4 drives. They use BTRFS on top of it (only the good bits, not the bits of btrfs that are suicidal to use). I've not had drive failures, but I have tested it by taking drives out (cue a lot of beeping and complaining but no problem rebuilding the array afterwards). It also scales up nicely; you just sequentially put bigger disks in, and the pool / volume simply grows.
Upvote
4
(4
/
0)
I guess I should clarify - energy assist HDD heads deteriorate from writing. Older heads don't, but they can mechanically wear out from constant seeking.
Upvote
2
(3
/
-1)
Because something doesn't cover the "smoking hole" scenario doesn't make it not a backup. However, one SHOULD plan for the smoking hole, I agree, if you really don't want to lose data.
But I don't understand why 3-2-1 isn't a backup, as is claimed? 3-2-1 covers the smoking hole because one of the copies is offsite, on a server, one copy is onsite, on a secondary device, and one copy is on your local hard drive (or maybe one copy is on a second external device like a USB stick, BD-ROM or whatever.
How is that not good coverage for the smoking hole?
Upvote
10
(10
/
0)
still need a source - never heard of heads (old or new) wearing out.
Upvote
4
(5
/
-1)
You don't actually have to use Synology's services / servers to access your at-home NAS.
When at home, just point at the NAS's net local IP address. When remote, you can use just run a VPN server to gain access to my home net. Their Synology Drive Client software cares not one way or other.
Upvote
2
(2
/
0)
3-2-1 absolutely does cover the claimed scenario. I was responding specifically to quoted user's implication that Kevin setting the terms of the conversation by laying out 3-2-1 was just "nerds" "trying to gate keep what IS and what ISN'T."
Upvote
6
(6
/
0)
I'm looking at this JBOD device to make storage and access easier now that I've moved to a laptop. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07Y4F5SCK .
Of the five drives, one for File History, two for Storage Spaces, and the remaining two for alternating local backups (does robocopy still work?). USB C on the back allows transfer to a drive to be taken off site.
I like that drives remain accessible on their own and just one connector to my laptop hub. Not maintaining a NAS is a plus.
How terrible is this?
Of the five drives, one for File History, two for Storage Spaces, and the remaining two for alternating local backups (does robocopy still work?). USB C on the back allows transfer to a drive to be taken off site.
I like that drives remain accessible on their own and just one connector to my laptop hub. Not maintaining a NAS is a plus.
How terrible is this?
Upvote
-1
(0
/
-1)
That's still not a source. And while heads wear out over a period of use, that's very different from the fact that SSDs writing data is actively destructive to the memory storage. It is not a matter of the device will eventually succumb to entropy. It is literally being slightly destroyed in the act of being written and this is inherent to the design of the storage medium. Sure, you get quite a few writes with decent brands and I'm not saying otherwise. It's simply that any storage of that sort has an inherently limited lifespan that is separate from the entropic reality that nothing lasts forever.
So until you cite an actual source for write heads being damaged while writing data to spinning HDDs, I'm going to call your claim inaccurate
Upvote
6
(6
/
0)
Thank you for this Blade Runner moment ... truly, this backup discussion has reached a cinematic level
Upvote
10
(10
/
0)
Let me ask this: Of all the external power supplies you've handled, how many have chokes on them? I'm looking at 13 power bricks in my (extended) vicinity and only two have them. Two, and one is a device from the 90s.
I've even seem USB cables with chokes on them. What do they know that that the thousands of other manufacturers and vendors don't? (Answer: They know that some people will buy anything.)
So either the rest of the industry has solved this, or they don't care about this supposedly widespread problem and yet still manage to stay in business and get great reviews that never mention how the electromagnetic radiation from the power cords has taken down civilization.
You know who loves this supposed problem? Ferrite donut manufacturers. They love it like undercoating companies love car dealers.
Edit to add:
This is the last I ever want to hear about this canard. Here's a review of Synology's home router, showing the power supply that comes with it:
https://everythingmetro.com/synology-wrx560-review-best-mid-tier-wi-fi-6-router.html
Exhibit fucking A:
What's missing from this picture?
I'm going to start a political movement: YOUR FERRITE IS CHOKING ME!
Those goddamn things belong in the same bin as $150 speaker cables.
Last edited:
Upvote
-7
(2
/
-9)
You can believe me or not, but it doesn't change reality.
HDDs wear out from use. They absolutely die a guaranteed death through use. I doubt you'll find citable sources for specific wearout mechanisms as they are generally pretty closely guarded by manufacturers.
You also generally won't find anything concrete about write-disturb on HDDs, but that's absolutely a thing too.
(my day job is massive-scale storage on both SSDs and HDDs)
Upvote
3
(4
/
-1)
Better than nothing, at least. But I feel like you're bundling a bunch of conjoined points of failure into one box. One hard drive fails? Data's lost. Sounds like you have different drives for different purposes so that alone any one drive failing isn't catastrophic, just a slice of your storage/backup/version history, but it is irrevocable.
A NAS running a 4-5 drive array can have complete redundancy with one or two drive failures. All your desired purposes can be allocated a space on that array, safe from any single drive failure.
Then you get to ways that the whole box can fail. A NAS can die, in some ways that let you transfer all the discs to another NAS and keep going, in some ways that might kill data. A box of discs plugged into USB can fail in even more ways, some that can cause data loss (sudden power loss or unplugging.) Any decent NAS has a file system that's robust to sudden power loss, and a network system that's robust to sudden connection loss. Yes USB connected drives aren't as bad as they used to be but there's still a lot more potential for data/file system corruption on top of the failure of a single in-progress write.
Honestly it sounds like at least as much maintenance as a NAS since you have different drives with different purposes and tasks that have to be set up independently. A box plugged directly into your laptop, with a bunch of different things you manage from the laptop's OS hardly seems easier than a box plugged into your router, with a few one-time configuration changes to a web interface and a bunch of things you then manage from your laptop.
Last edited:
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
I use SHR2 on my 5-drive Synology, and I have successfully recovered from a 2 disk failure.
How the heck did I get a real 2 disk failure? There's a lesson in that about considering weak links... in my case I had the NAS on a UPS, but the NAS's power brick started intermittently failing - I noticed it was making noise. The fluctuation in power had me seeing successive emails announcing a degraded array, then a critically degraded array just minutes apart.
Storage Pool 1 on Server1 degraded (total number of drives: 5; number of active drives: 3). Information of the drives in abnormal status is shown below:
It scared the crap out of me. Shut the thing down until I could order a replacement power brick. Replaced the power brick, and bad drives, rebuilt the volume with 2 new disks and that unit still has been in service for many years with nary an issue. No data loss.
So that says something good and bad about Synology's hardware/software quality. I still think they're the best game in town all things considered.
I came out from the above scenario where I now carry a backup power brick in reserve so avoid an extended outage in case one of these things dies again, and then I also spent $$$ to Hyperbackup out to a 2nd Synology out of state and that has been marvelous.
Upvote
4
(4
/
0)
I think I accidentally responded to the wrong thread. I was trying to respond to the thread where Bob.Brown claimed that 3-2-1 doesn't cover all the backup scenarios, and I got confused and thought the "smoking hole" scenario concept was a furtherance of that discussion.
In any case, I was fundamentally trying to respond to Bob who claimed 3-2-1 doesn't cover all three scenarios of "oops I deleted/corrupted my file", "I need to archive data I don't want to store locally" (well, Ok, if you are deleting the local copies, that is a problem - although, one can delete a file off their c drive or Unix/Linux/Mac root fs if they have first copied it to another, third storage device), and "My local drives are destroyed/failed".
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
Man, I was a big proponent of WHS back in the day; was absolutely devastated when they abandoned the product. I consequently continued to run it way too long after it went out of support. I don't know if it was my Gigabyte mobo or the WD drives I used, but I had more drive failures over time than in any other machine I've ever built. And every time time the system disk failed that was a pain in the butt.
But I have everything now I had back then and then some with my Synology coupled with Veeam for client backups. And more recently I've added a second server as an offsite backup to the first and while it's expensive I simply couldn't do that before.
Upvote
2
(2
/
0)
ROFL, right, it's a conspiracy from Big Ferrite Donuts. Dude, again, just because you have not personally seen a thing does not make it not real.
I've seen this stuff happen devices more than once. It happens most when a device has multiple wires that are straight and lack shielding. I was first exposed to it as a thing when I supported Microsoft Hardware and one of the engineers designing the products showed me what could happen with a WiFi router places next to a Force Feedback Pro joystick. It's easy to see with the proper equipment but you don't need that to rule it out by simply changing a device's positioning. I've since experienced is a number of times over the years when moving a WiFi router a foot to one side or the other made an issue go away where placing it back in the original spot made it recur. This isn't something that's quite what I'd call common but it's also not rare, either.
Just recently I had a client who was convinced "her WiFi had been hacked". From her description of the problem, it sounded a little like a possibly failing WiFi router to me since it would intermittently just not work. She'd be connected but no data could be sent or received. She thought it was hacked because it coincided almost perfectly with her infant's nap schedule. After some discussion I decided to go out and look at the environment since something was clearly going on. Sure enough, she was turning on a baby monitor in the little one's nap room which was sitting next to the router. Turning the baby monitor on and off replicated the issue at will. Moving the monitor to a table on the other side of the room resolved it entirely.
The sorts of cables with that sort of shielding on them are made to be used in the relatively uncommon but real situations where it matters. Sure, it doesn't matter for the vast majority of cases but when it does, having one available is rather useful. Whether the specific hardware here needs one or not can't be determined forem the available evidence but the simple fact is they're absolutely useful in certain situations.
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
Sure, but that's not what I'm saying about SSDs. The storage medium SSDs use literally damages the memory storage location every time a new bit is written to it. That's not just wearing out with time, it's inherently destructive. With HDDs, however, some die sooner than others but it's based on general wear and tear due to entropy, not something which is inherently destructive in the performance of its job.
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
Energy assisted hard drives burn out the heads over time. It's inherently destructive as they experience rapid heating and cooling. Older standard HDDs wear out via seek fatigue as well as a lot of other factors.
Anyway, we're well off topic at this point. All drives die, and use does absolutely impact how and when they die. That's all I was trying to point out - it's not a phenomenon restricted to SSDs on Flash alone.
Upvote
-1
(1
/
-2)
Big ferrite donuts won't cure a baby monitor running on 2.4 GHz interfering with WiFi. That kind of interference has nothing to do with cables. Nothing you described really has anything to do with cables.
Upvote
-2
(1
/
-3)
Well said.
And for many people "some backup" is already light years ahead of the more normal "no backup".
A Synology box often appears to be quite expensive given the price of the constituent components, but then I guess they've got to make a living out of selling it. Seems like a fair trade for the convenience for many.
Upvote
8
(8
/
0)
How is this BeeStation different than a low end Synology NAS other than having a preinstalled drive and not making it easy to replace? I've got a QNAP NAS but all the features here sound like things that would be present on one of their NASes. Did they just add some setup wizards to a Single drive NAS to make it a little less scary? Are the Bee Apps actually different or just a simplified interface for their normal app?
I do wish Windows had something built in comparable to Time Machine. Being built in it's much easier to get people to actually use it and pointing my wife's new MacBook Air at the QNAP nas was pretty simple. Now I don't really have to worry about it. I've got backups for files for multiple versions and even a full system restore if I need it.
One thing I do wish the EU would look into is Apple iCloud. I'd love to be able to have the full iCloud backup with my QNAP nas or my MS one drive included in my Office 365 sub. Sure, Apple might not be able to guarantee the reliability of a third party back up but I'm okay with that. Failing that, I'd love a reliable way for automatic photo backups. I get why Apple wants to keep a tight lid on things running in the background on phones but it's pretty annoying to have to manually launch the QNAP app to be 100% sure to get photo back ups.
I do wish Windows had something built in comparable to Time Machine. Being built in it's much easier to get people to actually use it and pointing my wife's new MacBook Air at the QNAP nas was pretty simple. Now I don't really have to worry about it. I've got backups for files for multiple versions and even a full system restore if I need it.
One thing I do wish the EU would look into is Apple iCloud. I'd love to be able to have the full iCloud backup with my QNAP nas or my MS one drive included in my Office 365 sub. Sure, Apple might not be able to guarantee the reliability of a third party back up but I'm okay with that. Failing that, I'd love a reliable way for automatic photo backups. I get why Apple wants to keep a tight lid on things running in the background on phones but it's pretty annoying to have to manually launch the QNAP app to be 100% sure to get photo back ups.
Upvote
7
(7
/
0)
Two years ownership here, no complaints yet, though I've not had to rely on their customer support.
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
The point is about how folks don't recognmize RF interference being a thing. It's an example of RF interference that ordinary folks don't recognize as such despite it being pretty obvious once you know RF interference is indeed actually a thing.
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
Refuses to run on my hardware (which is run of the mill consumer stuff, not brand new, not ancient, like ~3 years old?). In fact it does something bonkers. If I have an unraid USB in the server when it boots it breaks the motherboard's ability to see USB keyboards and mice until I do a CMOS reset with the jumpers on the motherboard. I was utterly at a loss on that one. Tried it with four different thumb drives, from four different manufacturers, made 2-3 different ways each.
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
It sounds to me like her baby needs a ferrite choke installed.
(I hope she wasn't using a Synology Wifi router. Those things come with unshielded, untwisted power cords that throw off enough electromagnetic radiation to take down an airliner.)
Last edited:
Upvote
-7
(0
/
-7)
That looks nice. If I ever ditch windows storage spaces for my big dumb file server I'm definitely gonna look into whether they have a >=6-bay device that has SHR and allows either USB or eSATA so that post-setup I could just use it as a dumb barrel of data and not have to worry about long-term security support. I'm looking for a way to merge together a messy pile of disks into a 10-20TB pool and then not think about them too much for a decade if I'm lucky. I like these flexible striped parity setups because I'm cheap and I only need enough redundancy for it to not be a complete pain in the ass if one disk fails, because I back up vital stuff off this mess in other places/ways.
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
I guess Synology's own Wifi product engineers don't recognize this either. Perhaps you should warn them!
Upvote
-4
(2
/
-6)
Have you looked at how cheap new disks are? If you're turning "a pile" of old disks into a measly 10TB array, it'd probably be easier and cheaper to just buy a new disk or two. Last time I picked up 18TB drives, they were $200 a pop.
Upvote
4
(4
/
0)
There is actually something quite a bit like Time Machine built into Windows. They call it "File History" and it's a bit more faffing to set up (but nothing hard at all). It can work with either an external drive or a network location, and really works pretty well.
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
zfs-snapshot-mgmt
I haven't had any problems with Cat5 or Cat6 cables though. I haven't played with Cat7 or Cat8 yet.
I've seen it once. A length of Cat3 was running alongside the AC power cord. I just could not get a consistent 10 Mbps transfer rate across that cable. Swapping the Cat3 cable didn't help. Once I re-routed the power cord, I was able to get 10 Mbps.
I haven't had any problems with Cat5 or Cat6 cables though. I haven't played with Cat7 or Cat8 yet.
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
Used Synology in enterprise work and home use for years. So far, noo issues.
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
Running along fluorescent ballasts can cause issues with 5 and 5e. Not sure on 6 as I have never run across that situation yet.
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
Given that modern cables are shielded themselves, it's rarely an issue.
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
Which category cables are you referring to? I thought Cat-6[A] could be had both shielded and unshielded. (Cat-5e are generally unshielded.)
Upvote
2
(2
/
0)
I think it can cover the smoking hole scenario with caveats.
a) The cloud backup and your site (home) are not both smoking holes. At that point you probably have a much worse issue to deal with; but hey you are alive and the meteor missed you.
b) You've backed up everything to cloud. Well done. All you business continuity testing has passed. Well done you have done better then most enterprises businesses that fudge this stage. But your only way to access the cloud information is stored onsite and links to 2FA on other devices also onsite. Your home gets smashed by a herd of hippos, all your devices are destroyed. You go to get access to the cloud but you have no way to authenticate and prove who you are.
c) You've backed up everything to the cloud. Well done. What's BCP? Meh. Your favourite and only all in one device is sat on by your cat who thinks it's a mat and melts down. You go to download your backups from the cloud and find they have been archived in a manner that does not allow them to restore your device. You do still have your motivational pictures of cats saved. Welcome to management.
Upvote
-5
(0
/
-5)