 The CM Storm SF17 uses a massive 18cm fan to cool your gaming notebook and it adds a four-port USB hub. Click now to learn more. Alright guys, so today I'm going to be talking a lot about storage and backup and whenever you talk about these topics, you have to talk about the 3-2-1s of storage. What are the 3-2-1s of storage? Well, have three copies of everything that you deem very important. Have two different formats for that data and have at least one of those backups being off-site. That is essentially one working copy, one locally backed up or remotely backed up copy, and at least one off-site copy, not near-site, as in quite a distance between you and that copy. This is for very important data if you're just a home user, so stuff like tax records or family photos or wedding photos or anything that you deem extremely important. Another thing to note is that RAID is not backup. RAID's got your back if you have drive failure and it provides fault tolerance for those drives but it cannot protect you from user error, file system corruption, natural disasters, and many more things. RAID is awesome at keeping your system stable and keeping uptime high, but backup is only actually a backup when it is an additional copy of the data, not the working copy. Simply putting all of your data onto a NAS and using it from there doesn't make it a backup. It makes it a working copy with fault protection on the drives. For home users, accomplishing a 3-2-1 setup isn't actually that hard. You can back up your important files to something like Flash or Optical Disk storage locally and then just have Dropbox or something like Dropbox sync your files off-site. But for those looking for a more elegant and scalable solution, there's definitely more options in the NAS space. Now because I have recently moved a lot of my backup data from inside my tower to a Synology NAS, I've been discovering a lot of really cool stuff about it. This video is going to focus on Synology's DSM software, but we'd love to hear what you guys have to say about other solutions and what other solutions you might want us to check out, like FreeNAS or something like that. If you're wondering what model of NAS you should get in the Synology space, you can check out the Synology NAS Selector. It can help you figure out things based on user count, data size, and a ton of other metrics. Now, before we go any deeper, to get the most out of this video, it will help to have a basic understanding of what both RAID and NAS mean. Check out these tech quickie videos here to learn a couple things about RAID and hopefully, check out this video here to learn things about NAS, although Linus doesn't have this video done yet, so hopefully it'll be ready by the time you see this. Alright, so now that we've got all that taken care of, let's get started. Installing the drives is going to be quite easy with a quick start guide. Once they're in there, you can either go to find.synology.com to find your NAS through the browser and begin setup, or you can go to Synology's download page, input your model, and download the Synology Assistant, which is a desktop application that will help you find your NAS, and will allow you to manage it through your browser, monitor its resources through the desktop application, and other cool stuff. Before we move on, I'd like to show off Synology's RAID Calculator. It's a super useful tool that will help you figure out exactly how much usable storage and other things you'll have when running different drive, RAID, and SHR configurations. You can find it by going to the bottom of Synology's page and just clicking on RAID Calculator. Now, I know, I know, I made you all learn about these different RAID levels and now I'm not going to be using them. Sorry, I'm going to be using Synology Hybrid RAID, or SHR. I find it cool because it allows you to have RAID-like redundancy while mixing and matching your drives of different capacities. Once you have it set up, you can expand it as long as the drives you're adding are equal to or greater than the size of the smallest drive in your array. So for example, we would be able to add anything that's 500GB or above because I have a 500GB drive in my array. Unlike other RAID-ish technologies, Synology realizes that you might not want to stick with Synology forever and be stuck in this one RAID configuration on this one device. So they allow you to recompile your data on any PC running Linux. That's because this is not a proprietary solution. This is a solution based on a Linux RAID setup and they have a guide for doing all this, which is awesome. Alright, so once you're inside and you've found your NAS, you just got to select a few simple options. You can decide whether or not you want to clean or migrate your data. And then you want to decide whether or not you want to download the latest DSM software, which I do recommend or if you want to manually install it later on, if you do want some specific patch for some reason. Set up your admin account and name your server next and then decide whether or not you want to have Synology Hybrid RAID volume installed. If you're not going with Synology Hybrid RAID, do not select this option. If you are, make sure you do. Once that's all done and we log in, the first thing we're going to want to do is create user groups and users because using the admin account is not going to be ideal. This is very straightforward, so I'm not going to show the entire process, but I will show just the creation of an employee user group and naming of the description. But from here on out, it's just selecting things like what apps and folders they have read and write access to. Now all we have left is to set up our drive volume. So honestly, like with most Synology software, if you just read the text below the options, it's going to be really straightforward. And your biggest question is going to be one disk fault tolerance or two disk fault tolerance. These line up with RAID 5 and 6. And if you watch Linus's video on that, you'll know which one will work best for you. All right, now to the fun stuff. We're going to install some apps. There's a wide range of apps in the store, including everything from running your own small website or business to audio and video managers that are actually quite simple, but make your life a lot easier. Installation and setup of these apps is quick and easy. And a lot of the core apps, like I just said, the audio and video manager and a few other things have mobile components as well. Next up is the mobile app pairings, which seem stable, which is good. But personally, I feel like their usability and UI could use some work and the feature list seems fairly limited. Just to show an example of this, I'm inside of a folder in my app right now and I can select play all and move it to shuffle from there. But it doesn't work for all songs unless you have every single one of your songs inside one individual folder. You can tell at the top, I'm not selecting anything funny. You can only select by genres or folders recently added composers, stuff like that, not everything. And at the very top, I haven't selected on library. The only other options are stuff like downloaded songs and playlists, not everything. Just to cap things off here, there's a few things that I really appreciated over the time of using this NAS that I'd like to go over in no particular order. First off, and my personal favorite out of all of these is the share links. You can take any file that you have and create a share link for it. You'll notice here that I'm running a local IP, but if you make this NAS publicly accessible and give it some sort of domain or something like that, that can change very easily. There's tons of different options for sharing this and different levels at which you can share it. So different permissions based on like social networks or people that have access to the NAS already or QR codes and how long this link will actually work for tons of different options and a great feature to have on a NAS. Next up is cloud sync. So with cloud sync, you can actually use it to sync up with a few different cloud solutions. But in this example, I'll be using Dropbox. After a simple authentication process, there's really not much more to set up. And this is a great way to have offsite synchronization and backup of your different really important files. Last but not least is quick connect. Quick connect allows you to access your NAS outside of your home network. So far, everything that we've been able to do is simply tied in within our network. If you register on my distation account and then select a quick connect ID, that's pretty much all you need to do to be able to set up quick connect. If you're worried about quick connect and want to do everything manually, if you go to external access, you can see all of the manual things you have to do there and then configure your router a little bit and then you're good to go. There are guides on how to do this on Synology's website. So it won't be too hard, but it will take a little bit of manual intervention. All right, guys, that's a wrap. I hope you guys liked this video. Be sure to let me know what other NAS solutions you might want me to check out in the comments down below. Like and dislike this video and be sure to subscribe. If you want to comment on the forum, I like reading things on the forum, be sure to do that as well. If you don't like the ads that are on the forum, be sure to become a forum contributor as those get rid of all the ads on the site. If you want a Linus Tech Tips shirt, be sure to check out the district lines link in the description below. We have some really cool ones coming. And as always, thank you guys for watching and I'll see you guys next time.