Logical backup workflow for my environment Let’s take a look at the first stage of this process – getting the files from the Mac to the DS1813+. Equipment For the purposes here, I have two separate Synology devices.

The newer, faster unit is the one I’ve decided to use for my aggregation/syncing device. Not only am I using the device to mirror my Mac’s internal drives, but it is also acting as my media server, running Plex, and feeding my own, personal entertainment library, plus home videos, and audio projects, etc. So, the 1813+ is not a good candidate as a backup location (best practice is to make sure that your backup device is only used as a backup device, and this definitely is not).

It is, however, a good first stage for collating all the data that exists on a number of volumes on the Mac, and then turn around and back them up ( not sync) to the DS 1511+. Both machines are running the latest version of DSM 5.2 (DSM 5.2-5592 Update 3), as of this writing. Before We Get Started It’s important to note, and I’m pretty sure if you’re reading this you already know it, but I gotta say it loud and clear: your mileage will vary.

My setup configurations are based upon my own personal requirements, my workflow, and how I want to access my data when something goes wrong (there’s no “if” here; I know it’s going to happen at some point!). Doing backups is all about the restore, too, which means that I need to make sure I know how to get my data back as quickly and accurately as possible in tense, time-sensitive, and high-pressure emotional moments. To that end, the up-front work I’m doing (while I’m calm and collected) is supposed to help me have multiple opportunities to recover lost data in the easiest possible fashion (when I’m stressed and frazzled). Disclaimer: The information here is for example and informational purposes only.

As we’re talking about data loss, use at your own risk. I accept no liability whatsoever for your data, just like no one else does for mine. All these methods have been tested and worked on my system, not yours. So, there are a number of tools in Synology’s toolbox that are not appropriate for my specific needs, and as a result I’m not going to cover them all in this blog series. If you follow my setup to the letter, you’ll be forced to my workflow, but also any errors I make along the way.

Before we start messing around with the interface, it’s important to keep a couple of things in mind. The most important thing of all – and I cannot stress this enough – is always know where you are. Think both ways However, it turns out in this case that really wasn’t the best way to do it. Sure, when you set up the policies, you’ll do it from the source to the destination (well, actually, it’s iterative, and you go back and forth between each device), but you plan from the end point backwards. There are a few reasons for this.

First, what you eventually wind up with for a resting place for your offsite/long-term/last resort storage will dictate how you get data to it. Now, having said that out loud, it makes a great deal of sense and seems self-evident, but when you think from the source forward, you start to realize that the methods and policies you put in place (compression, encryption, versioning, etc.) may not be compatible at all with your chosen solution end-to-end. No further In my example, I had originally wanted a syncing process to start with for the 1813, and then put some sort of versioning on the 1511 (the one closest to the cloud storage link).

Only then did I find out limitations about not only encryption, but also versioning, and my choices severely limited my choice of cloud providers (and, as luck would have it, limited it only to the most expensive options!). It was only when I started to look at the problem backwards that a more coherent process started to emerge (special hat tip to Franklin Hua of Synology who guided me towards this way of thinking!). Don’t fool yourself: cost is a serious concern. Conventional wisdom dictates that “you get what you pay for,” and to a large extent this is true.

We’ll go over this in a later article in detail, but if you’re not careful you can wind up paying a lot more money than necessary for the wrong solution because of your workflow. You could use free tools, after all. I could and have been using it as my manual copying/backup method thus far. However, when handling large amounts of files I’ve found that rsync can be somewhat flaky on my system, which doesn’t lend itself for unattended backup too well. Instead, Synology’s DSM 5.2 offers a pretty good suite of tools to choose from.

The trick, of course, is figuring out which tools do what I want them to do. While the DSM help files are good about explaining certain check boxes, radio buttons, and tab interfaces, it does nothing for explaining the relationship between all the different options, nor why you want to choose one option over the other.

That onus is on the user (i.e., me). Getting Data to the DiskStation DS1813+ I decided to use Synology’s Cloud Station sync to move the files from the Mac’s internal volumes to the Diskstation’s shared folder setup, setting up a versioning policy of 5 maximum versions. Note: in my research I did come across, which seem to be related to a combination of hard drive hibernation and multiple device access/modification of files. As I’m using this as an effective one-way replication, however, I decided to move forward with Cloud Station as the solution to start with. More to the point, Synology has told me that the developers are aware of the problem and addressed several of the issues in subsequent releases since the initial post, and is working on resolving remaining issues for Windows users in an upcoming release.

So, I think it’s worth updating the awareness to the new state of stability. Originally I had intended to encrypt this backup, but for reasons that will be explained below, it turns out that this messed up the workflow considerably. Even though the Cloud Station sync process is 2-way, and I’ll only be using it 1-way, the Shared Folder Sync process in the Backup & Replication tool does not give me the ability to do the versioning that I want. Somewhere along the line, I want to be able to recover accidentally deleted files, and if I can’t do that on the DS1511+ due to encryption limitations (again, see below), this is where I need to do it.

These are the steps (and mistakes) I made in order to get it working. Setup Synology has put together a great tutorial for setting up Cloud Station client (both Mac and PC), and I’m not going to duplicate it here. It’s a short 3 minute video that will take you less time to watch than to read here, and certainly far less time for me to paste the link than to recreate the steps. 😛 youtube://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZX8XK9Wy2Y I am, however, going to go into some detail that the video and do not cover. Cloud Station sync Once the Cloud Station was set up (following the directions in the video above), it was now time to connect the dots, so to speak. I always think it’s good to start small, and of the choices my Data Drive was the smallest volume that I have. This would not help me or my logical workflow, as I want to be able to quickly see the progress of different backup tasks and/or (more importantly) quickly go to locations for restoration/recovery purposes.

I already have folders on my DS1813+ that I’ve been using to manually rsync my files, and I don’t want to create another copy of this data on the Diskstation (that, ultimately, defeats the purpose). Instead, I want to create a shared folder on the DiskStation that I can tie together with the Cloud Station client software. Sadly, this does not appear to be possible, so it looks like I’m not going to be able to get what I want. Still, I don’t want the backup to go into the homes folder, as that isn’t intuitive to me. Instead, I went into the DSM File Station utility, and created a new Shared Folder.

You’ll notice that I didn’t bother to worry about the Windows-centric check-boxes, as they’re only applicable if you’re using the Windows Sharing protocol. Even though “Recycle Bin” is a common Windows term, in this case Synology creates its own location for deleted files before they are actually removed from the system using the same name, and so it is not solely specific for Windows users. This is about as close as you can get to recovering accidentally deleted files using this method that I’ve found.

More information can be found in about these settings. One of the other reasons to choose the recycle bin option was that it creates an actual, visible folder at the beginning of the directory, so in case I’m looking at the two directories I can see at a glance which one is which so that I don’t accidentally mess with my original folder. Note: I’ve found this #recycle element very useful. Because I’m trying to get mirrored copies of the data in multiple locations, there have been more than one occasion when I’ve found myself trying to remember which one was which. Especially when you’re have limited capacity and you want to remove testing attempts or badly configured folders, you want to make sure you’re in the right place ( “always know where you are!”) before you start deleting files!

Seeing the #recycle folder always lets me know that this is the backup/sync’d copy. If I don’t see it, I should not delete it. Choosing the encryption option flags a warning message. In my case, I qualify for all of these criteria (so I thought), and I clicked on “Yes.” As it turns out not so much ahem. Presenting Some Notes on Encrypting Backups with Synology: To my surprise, when the folder was completed a file called “DataVolume.key” immediately downloaded to my Mac. I say surprisingly because there is about this new document. It turns out that this is an encrypted file which is used for mounting the shared folder.

More to the point, Shared Folders can be mounted via this key file or via the pass phrase that was used when the folder was created. Admins can enable the “auto-mounting” of the encrypted folder for convenience (this way they don’t have to log into the DSM to mount the encrypted folder), though Synology does not recommend this. If you eventually wish to delete this folder, you’ll need to have administrator privileges for that. The backup user in my setup does not have admin privileges, however, so for good measure I gave admin the checkmark as well for read/write, since I do all my deletion locally to the DiskStation. At this point, all we’ve done is create a shared folder and make sure that the backup user can connect to it. In order to connect from the Mac, however, I need to make sure that the shared folder DataVolume is enabled in the Cloud Station server interface. Syncing starts as soon as you click “Done” At this point the synchronization was already running.

Immediately I could open up the Data drive in the Finder and see that items were marked for copying. According to Synology, there is supposed to be a blue circle for items in progress of copying, and another for items that have already been copied.

However, there appears to be an issue with this reporting. First, the window that opens when you click on the link in the Cloud Station client software (see the image above that shows the blue /Volumes/Data), it opens a finder window of the folder structure for the data drive. In the Finder, the performance (while Cloud Station is syncing, especially) is dog slow. This is because of the way that the Cloud Station client interacts with the Finder to update all the different folder and file icons.

Personally, I use from CocoaTech as my Finder-replacement, and the slowdown issues are non-existent as Cloud Station client does not interact with it at all. Second, the circles that indicate sync status (blue for in progress, green with checkmarks for completed), are simply incorrect. As you can see from the screenshots below, the Finder indicates that the sync process has been completed for several of the folders when, in PathFinder, you can see from the mounted DataVolume drive that they have not. If you’re having problems, you can turn this off Immediately when I deselected those options the Finder went back to its normal speed for listing items in the directory. I’ve been in contact with Synology about this and let them know that I’ve read some blogs online that have mentioned this as well, and they are looking into it. Repeat As Necessary All in all I have four internal volumes that need to be sync’d to the DS1813+. I follow the same steps for each of the volumes and I have up-to-the-minute copies of my main data now stored on my Diskstation, with a policy of a maximum of 5 versions.

Should I so choose, I can then make these folders available for use on other devices, such as my iPhone, iPad, or even other computers (such as my wife’s laptop) by connecting the devices to the Cloud Station. Those tasks, however, fall outside the scope of this article, however.

Deleting a Share Folder One of the things that I found to be frustrating was that there is no one single location to delete a shared folder. Moreover, the help files don’t appear to have these instructions anywhere (I could have simply missed it, and I did look for it, but it is possible that I missed it somewhere – in any case, it’s not a simple button, but rather a series of steps you have to take). Let’s say that I wanted to create a shared folder for my Archive volume, but then changed my mind (or, to put it more honestly, I accidentally place the Data backup folder into the Archive backup folder). Here, you can see that I have created a shared folder called ArchiveBackup with a single folder residing inside (“Data Backup”). However, I’m still stymied when I try to delete the main folder.

Instead of selecting “Delete,” I canceled, wondering if I was getting errors because the directory wasn’t empty. It turns out it was simply that I was trying to delete from the File Station (silly me), which was the wrong place. The reason for this is that it is a Shared Folder, and the act of deleting must be done from the Shared Folder tab in the Control Panel, not the File Station menu. Once you’re inside the Control Panel - Shared Folder, you can delete the folder as normal. That little checkbox wasn’t necessary in my setup, because I wasn’t doing any fancy OSX or Windows ACLs.

Don’t worry, if you don’t know what those are, you aren’t using them either, most likely. However, if you find yourself unable to delete a shared folder and have scoured the interface to find that elusive checkbox, uncheck this, and you should be good to go. This can be particularly frustrating because there are numerous places where your user permissions can be checked (e.g., Cloud Station settings, User settings, Shared Folder settings), but this little checkbox can hold you back like a sneaky little bastard. As you can see, we have not yet set up any of the Backup solutions – we’re still only at syncing and aggregating. In the next article, we’ll connect the Aggregated Backup storage DS1813+ to the actual Backup location, the DS1511+. After that, we’ll look at exploring cloud storage options for last-resort Disaster Recovery. Update 2015.08.26: Corrected errata about backing up encrypted folders.

Corrected names of devices to their proper designation Disclosure: No payment was received for these articles. However, Synology provided me the Diskstation 1813+ (but not the drives), free of charge, for evaluation purposes. I also did get valuable help from Franklin Hua, Synology Sr. Technical Marketing Engineer, to whom I am especially grateful. Absolutely no editorial guidance was offered or solicited by Synology, other than to ask that I correctly identify their equipment.

Synology Cloud Station Drive Download

I’m very pleased that this has been useful, and with updated hardware and software, so in order to do that I’ve recently created a. If you want to see more posts like this – or anything else to do with – please consider sponsoring future content. Follow, sponsor, or see more at:.

Synology Mac Address

UPDATE: If you have DSM 5.0, follow instead. Step by step guide on how to configure Cloud Station in your Synology NAS. Click on “main menu” and then click on “Package center”: 2. Find Cloud Station Package and click on Install: 3.

Click on “main menu” and on the cloud station icon: 4. Click on enable cloud station: 5. Now, for Cloud Station to work, you need to: a) either you b) or you use, which will enable you to access your files without connecting to the internet. Click on “privileges” and click the enable tick boxes for the users you want to give access to cloud station functionality: and you are done with the set up. Download Cloud Station Program to start syncing 7. Go to and choose your NAS model: 8.

Find, install and download the Cloud Station package: 9. Once it is installed, double click on the cloud station icon on your desktop and start the application: 10. Now you need to login in cloud station and depending on how you decided to connect cloud station previously (step 5) the login credentials will change:. either you: and in that case the server address is “yourdomainname.synology.me”. or you used QuickConnect: and in this case you just enter the quick connect name. Username: is the username of the user that will login in the application, ex: Ruth. Password: is the password you assigned to that user (if he/she hasn’t changed it afterwards.

If you don’t want to change the default folder location leave it as is and click next: and you are done, Cloud Station has been successfully installed: You will find your new folder under Favorites: and in your File Station you will find your files under HomesUserName (Ruth)Cloudstation One last thing, Cloud station will save the last versions of your files, so if you want to retrieve previous versions of current files, right click on the file and choose “browse previous versions”. NOTE: Only users can use this feature, this means that if you are logged in as an administrator you will not be able to use this. Log in as a user and you will see the option.