 Once you get to a certain point with these all-in-one NAS units, you're basically buying a full-fledged super compact computer, except that everything you don't need for storing data has been removed and it comes with software that's optimized for storage. So this one right here is basically that. This is the DS918 Plus. It's got a quad-core Celeron processor, 4 gigs of RAM, 4 hard drive bays in the front, and actually dual M.2 slots, which you can install SSDs in if you want to use them as a cache. Physically, there's not much to it. It's a NAS. So you've got dual 1 gig LAN ports, an eSATA interface if you wanted to add additional drives off the back of the device, and you've got a USB 3 port for the same purpose. Finally, there's DC power in and a couple of 92 millimeter cooling fans. Drives are mounted toollessly and we're gonna be loading this thing up with four Iron Wolf NAS 14 terabyte drives. So that's gonna give us a total of 56 terabytes of raw storage and how much we're left with is gonna depend on what level of data redundancy we configure our software with. So that's it. All our drives are installed. So now all we got to do is power it up and this thing is surprisingly functional. It's got everything from personal cloud backup features to the ability to use their office suite to edit and share documents. They've got a mobile app that allows you to again share files. You can set a password, you can set a time restriction. It acts as a fully functioning home media server so you can handle up to two 4k H.264 H.265 streams off of this device at once. It's really amazing how far entry-level, you know, Celeron hardware has come in the last five, ten years. And of course, you can use it to protect your data. So the 3-2-1 principle of data protection stipulates that you should have at least three copies of your data on at least two different storage mediums and one of them should be off-site. So the big feature we're looking at today is Synology's super easy off-site backup and you can do this in the cloud. But the problem with the cloud is that depending on what you're trying to store and just how much freaking data it is, that can get really, really expensive in monthly subscription fees. I mean part of the point of owning your own data is that you don't have to pay a subscription fee in order to store it or access it. So this not only keeps your data safe and only in your hands instead of giving it to large cloud storage providers, it also means that you can do it on the cheap. All you need is a Synology NAS and a friend who also has a Synology NAS. Excuse me, sir. So I've gone ahead and plugged in both of my Ethernet jacks that gives me failover in the event that you know a port on my switch dies or something like that. And now I'm gonna go ahead and fire this puppy up. Oh, I missed this before but there's another USB 3 port for expansion on the front there. So the first thing we're gonna do is install the Synology Assistant. This is gonna help us find our Synology NAS on the network. So you can see it shows up twice. That's because we plugged in both of our ports. So we're gonna go ahead and connect to this one. Set up. Install the latest disk station manager. So this is basically their operating system. It's wiping my drives right now, but that's okay because these are brand new. Ten minutes later, we're setting up our administrator account and a Quick Connect web account with Synology. Quick Connect allows us to connect to external devices without setting up port forwarding, which I mean obviously I can do that, but for some people might be complicated. So we can actually test this real quick on my phone by popping off my Wi-Fi. Lime is dark. Hey! Now that we're fired up, we're gonna head into our Storage Manager here, and we're gonna create a storage pool and a volume. Hmm. I'm gonna go for better performance and we're gonna go with the recommendation Which is raid five that gives us three drives worth of space and we can lose up to one entire drive without losing any Of our data man It's crazy to think you can have just about 40 terabytes of usable space in that How much is that gonna cost you in? Dropbox subscriptions. All right, let's create a volume. So our safe volume is created. We got 36 terabytes of storage space, but if we navigate to our Linus ology NAS There's nothing in there and there's no way to create a folder That's because we need to actually create our shares from within the Synology software So we're gonna go to our control panel here shared folder and create why we call this Super safe we can make this an encrypted folder Encryption is good Sure is All the falls there's no way to rescue this encrypted data. Yeah, that's right one way to rescue it though Would be to save this key file somewhere safe like on a USB drive that you put a security lockbox somewhere now We've got our super safe share and all we've got to do is find some data to put in it that we need to keep Super safe. How about some dank memes? And there it goes everything is working as intended these are now backed up on the network Of course, not everyone wants to manually select the files they want to back up So we're gonna open up the package center here and we're gonna look for the Synology Drive server We're gonna install this puppy We're also gonna need the Synology Drive client on any computers that we want to back up So I'm go ahead and install that we verify that Synology Drive is installed on the server by going to install we open it up Just head over to team folder. We're gonna use our encrypted drive here and enable this guy So we're gonna enable version control up to 32 versions Yes, our user account does have the appropriate permissions now We go back to the desktop software key in all of our credentials and theoretically it should connect I'll use quick connect. Hey, look at that. Now all we got to do is pick what our most important just essential data is make sure we you know, save all those pictures and You know saved games as for our destination team folder super safe Linus XPS Now you could just back up everything but there's a lot of stuff on a Windows PC. That is not exactly essential Continuous backup. Yeah, sure. Let me do that Whoo, so the clients running which means if we pop into Linus ology go to Linus XPS and Drill down to our pictures folder. Let's give this a second and it should populate All right, let's give that yield refresh and boom there it all is my dank means no longer need to be manually backed up of course Everyone who knows backup knows that what I have done here is not quite enough in the event of a house fire For example, both my laptop and my sonology NAS, which as you can see is located in my house Would be burned to a crisp. So I want one copy of my data off-site Fortunately, I have friends Or at least people that I pay to help me with things So I'm gonna give Jake a call and we're gonna show you guys how to take our backup that we've done here and replicate it to a buddy But without that person having access to your dank means thanks to the magic of encryption. Hey Jake Say what now Andy While those guys are fooling around we can have a look at the package center. There's a lot of stuff in here You can set up a mail server You can set up a Plex server for example So that you can stream media to yourself anywhere throughout the house or anywhere around the world whether it's to your phone or your laptop Or whatever the case may be you can use it to run a surveillance system in your house You can set it up to backup Selectively to a cloud service provider like a Dropbox or Google or whatever the case may be So that way you're not paying the entire bill of like, you know, all of your You know media backups and stuff like that if they're things that can be easily replaced You just about ready over there? Yeah, I'm ready to go. Okay. Andy, what do I do on my side? So you want to download? Hyper backup. Hyper backup. Wow. Regular backup isn't enough. And then on my side, I'm gonna download hyper backup vault And I'm basically creating a vault for you to hyper backup too, you know. So the use case for showing here is let's say Jake and I are tech savvy friends Or at least people that I pay and we want to kind of help each other out All we've got to do is buy an extra drive or two for each other Put them in each other's NASs and then we can act as backup targets for each other So we both have safe off-site backups without resorting to paying a cloud storage fee on a monthly basis Okay, I've got hyper backup Okay, so because we're not using Synology's quick connect system We're actually gonna have to port forward a TCP port Now for some people this might sound a little scary But because the Synology NASs already have UPNP We can pretty much do this automatically for most types of routers The advantage of not doing it with quick connect is that the person on the other end won't have access to my data Yeah So chances are if you're at a residential address you might have an IP address that is dynamic or changing So maybe every week or every month your IP address will actually cycle to something new Now for Linus connecting to me remotely this is not good Because every month or week or whatever he's gonna have to change my IP address in his settings to be able to access the files again So instead we're actually gonna set up something called dynamic DNS Now Synology includes this by default in their system and they even have their own service for it So we can just go in the software, set our host name, let's say jakenasstest.synology.me And we just click OK At some point here we should actually get our own domain name that's tied to my external IP address So when Linus goes to put it in on his end he can just put that domain name in and then never have to worry about it again Okay, so now that it's set up if we just want to go in and double check You can actually go back into the wizard and just click test connection And it should say status normal if it all worked and it looks like it did So now we can move on to actually port forwarding We're gonna head over to the router configuration tab and click setup router Now this is gonna check your internal gateway to see if it can actually do the UPNP port forward There's an error but I think it worked last time anyway so it should be good to go Okay, we can see that it's found a UPNP compatible router which is awesome It's a Ubiquiti something or other Click apply Now we have the router set up So now I can go in and actually create our port forwarding rule For all of Synology's built in applications they actually have the ports already defined So we can just go in here and say we want to do hyper backup vault It's gonna say our local port is 6281 which is perfect Click apply And then just click save It's gonna do some stuff in the background with your router And theoretically when it's done we should be able to access this application remotely Hey, connection okay, cool So it looks like it worked Now you can do stuff on your side there Linus Yay, okay So I'm going to backup destination, remote NAS device And then instead of entering the server IP I'm gonna enter the server name So Jake do you want to hit me with that? Okay, my host name is jakenasstest.synology.me Now that I've entered that I'm actually going to allow Jake to remote into my machine This is as far as we can tell the simplest way for him to validate the credentials for his NAS Without ever actually sharing them with me Like in my super secret username And then theoretically once I enter the password we should be able to see my shared folders There we go So Jake share is where I'm gonna backup all of Linus' top secret data Just hit next and the rest of it's up to you Okay, so now what I do here is I take my super, you know what I'm gonna take my whole super safe folder Boom Now I've got the ability to backup my applications Obviously I could download hyper backup again from the Synology store But what I don't necessarily want to deal with again is configuring all my settings So I'm gonna go ahead and get both hyper backup and drive server I'm gonna back those up as well I'm gonna enable client side encryption and I'm gonna go ahead and enter a password Encryption is good Oh you just gave me your password what the heck So normally I would not do that Did you leave some memes in there for me this time? Oh there we go I got it on my side Mine says waiting backing up here it goes Okay Yeah I see the running task here it says waiting to backup So far you have a total of 60 kilobytes on my system You're welcome Hahaha So on my side it shows up actually as like a folder And then if I go to open the folder it has a password encryption So I think you can say if you do a backup every night it'll have them all within there So that's pretty cool So you can see I'm uploading at around 12 megabytes a second Not bad That's what I'm receiving at so that's pretty good Yeah that's like very usable Like obviously I'm not gonna be backing up you know my entire library of blu-rays to Jake's house or anything like that That's kind of silly The idea is that I've already got a copy of that If I really wanted my blu-rays to be safe I'd drive to his house and leave them there So now Jake when it comes time for me to go ahead and restore that data Do you want to go ahead and enter that password and see if it works? Boom processing sweet I see all your data Oh and so it shows me two versions so that's cool because you backed up twice right? Uh yes Oh that actually brings us to something pretty cool Synology's backup software actually makes use of something called deduplication So when you're backing up over data that has already been backed up Say you've added a few photos and it runs its weekly backup It's not gonna transfer all of those let's say 10 gigabytes again So if you only added 5 megabytes of photos all it's gonna do is add the new photos and leave the rest of the data intact So you don't actually have to worry about screwing up your bandwidth cap every month So that's basically it In less than an hour I was able to configure backing up my system on a regular basis to my Synology NAS And backing my Synology NAS up to a friend Synology NAS or at least people that I pay Without him or her having any access to my files But me being able to sleep better at night knowing that everything is safe somewhere off site So massive shout out to Synology for sponsoring this video Their hardware NAS solutions are available in a broad variety of configurations And their software really does make it that easy even if you're not super tech savvy To get powerful functionality that otherwise you'd have to familiarize yourself with some command line wizardry in order to do I mean is that fair to say? Yeah I think so I mean if you were doing this on Unraid you'd be setting up R sync and cron tabs and like So go check them out at the link in the video description guys Giveaway remember? Oh that's right we've got a giveaway We're actually giving away a Synology NAS and a couple of I think it was 14 terabyte drives is that right Jake? Yeah we're giving away a double bay NAS or a dual bay NAS with two 14 terabyte iron wolf drives Woo! So go check that out at the link in the video description as well