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The Synology End Game

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Re: The Synology End Game

#311

Post by Forge36 »

Years ago (2015?) I bought a DS416j. Paid maybe $400 at the time. It was the simplest plug-n-play NAS could I could find. I didn't even know it had a GUI! (I was being very lazy with my searching). Two 2tb HDDs. Eventually I started running home assistant (no docker). 2023 I was getting annoyed with performance. Two 2tb SSDs added (4 slots) which helped. 2025 I've moved home assistant to a dedicated $70 thin client.

As a dedicated personal backup for my family it's been perfect. The latest vendor lock in has me reconsidering how I'll upgrade when the time comes. Until this post I was considering a $1000 unit and transferring my SSD drives before buying more storage.

Sounds like it's time to build a proper storage+computer rack.

Re: The Synology End Game

#312

Post by CamperBob2 »

edem wrote: post #235
plqbfbv wrote: post #126

I have used Synology NASes for a good 15y now, and the one I'm on will likely be my last (DS920). I have watched the software evolve from "quite good" to "very good" to "lets reimplement everything ourselves and close it off as much as possible". It's sad because back in the day, at least for me, the brand was the perfect UX in many regards: small form factor and low power, price-accessible 4/5 bay NASes, a couple CP…

What are the current options? I've been looking but I haven't found any. I have a DS923+ and it works fine, but I can already see what you are talking about.

There are a few previous-generation units still available on the market. This article reminded me that I'd meant to track down a DS1522+ before it's too late, and I found a couple on Amazon and other sites.

Re: The Synology End Game

#313

Post by aborsy »

I back up to Synology, but always recover from ZFS.

Synology DSM has all kinds of limitations and is slow. Your encryption cannot be like this, you cannot store data in your NVMes, the number of versions must be limited to that, you cannot search snapshots, Hyperbackup explorer provides just one button: Recover (compare that with restic or Borg!), encryption in HB is opaque, ABB is limited to specific kernel versions, information out of SMART is limited, cannot upgrade drives’ firmware, search options are too limited and search is bad, OpenVPN is old and has compatibility issues with newer systems, … I can go on and on!

You cannot compare that with a backup system with ZFS, restic/borg, syncthing and rclone, in the same class!

Re: The Synology End Game

#314

Post by ajoberstar »

I was on my 3rd Synology over the last 12 years or so. They were solid and something I didn't have to pay attention to.

But the drive lock-in tipped me over the edge when I needed to expand space. I'm getting burned out with all of these corporate products gradually taking away your control (Synology, Sonos, Harmony, etc.).

Even though it takes more time and attention, I ended up building my own NAS with ZFS on Debian using the old desktops I use for VMs. I did enjoy the learning experience, but I can't see it's that reasonable a use of time.

Re: The Synology End Game

#315

Post by esseph »

ajoberstar wrote: post #314

I was on my 3rd Synology over the last 12 years or so. They were solid and something I didn't have to pay attention to. But the drive lock-in tipped me over the edge when I needed to expand space. I'm getting burned out with all of these corporate products gradually taking away your control (Synology, Sonos, Harmony, etc.). Even though it takes more time and attention, I ended up building my own NAS with ZFS on Debia…

> can't see it's that reasonable a use of time

That totally depends on if you enjoyed yourself and maybe learned something or not. Totally up to you!

Re: The Synology End Game

#316

Post by LeoPanthera »

aborsy wrote: post #313

I back up to Synology, but always recover from ZFS. Synology DSM has all kinds of limitations and is slow. Your encryption cannot be like this, you cannot store data in your NVMes, the number of versions must be limited to that, you cannot search snapshots, Hyperbackup explorer provides just one button: Recover (compare that with restic or Borg!), encryption in HB is opaque, ABB is limited to specific kernel versions…

ZFS is why I bought a QNAP NAS. As far as I can tell, no Synology device supports ZFS, but lots of QNAP devices do.

Re: The Synology End Game

#317

Post by kalleboo »

jraph wrote: post #84
tecleandor wrote: post #48

Not only that, but their security situation is terrible. Their OS is full of EOL'ed stuff. On products you can buy TODAY, you find: - Their Btrfs filesystem is a fork of a very old branch and doesn't have modern patches - A custom, non standard, self built, ACL system for the filesystem - Kernel 4.4 - PHP 7.4 (requirement for their Hyperbackup app) - smbd 4.15 - PostgreSQL 11.11 - smbd 8.2p1 - Redis 6.2.8 - ... They…

Why do they need to use an old Brtfs fork? What is missing in the mainline kernel for them?

I don't know if this is the reason, but supposedly their btrfs fork contains a custom integration with mdraid/lvm so that when btrfs detects a bad block, it signals lvm to do a repair. This is their solution to avoid using btrfs raid5/6 which is still marked unstable.

Re: The Synology End Game

#318

Post by aborsy »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #140
Shank wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The encryption is also broken. If you use encrypted shared folders, you have an arbitrary filename limit ( https://kb.synology.com/en-ro/DSM/tutorial/File_folder_path_... ). If you use volume encryption, your encryption key is stored on the NAS itself, which is capable of decrypting the data, unless you buy a second Synology NAS ( https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2023/06/volume-encryption-in-syno... ) to act as a key vault…

The filename limit comes from ecryptfs ( https://www.ecryptfs.org/ ) which is what Synology uses for encrypted shared folders. As for full disk encryption, you can select where to store the key, which may be on the NAS itself (rendering FDE more or less useless) or on a USB key or similar.

Why can’t the user enter the encryption passphrase in DSM, which is actually the default in LUKS and allowed in TrueNAS etc?

The DSM itself lives in an unencrypted partition or volume. Applications with data in encrypted volumes will be inaccessible until the volumes are unlocked.

As usual, there is an easy workaround. You can run a KMIP server in a docker container and set up an external keystore. Once synology allows you to proceed with volume encryption, you can discard the KMIP server if you want and use the recovery keys.

Re: The Synology End Game

#319

Post by lotsoweiners »

_def wrote: post #303
atlasduo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easily explained: when times are tough, delivering growth naturally is hard. Squeezing the customer is the lowest hanging fruit. Sure, long term reputation is severely damaged, but why would decision makers care? Product owners interests are not aligned with interests of the company itself. Squeeze the customer, get your miniscule growth, call it "unlocking value", get your bonus, slap it onto your resume and move on…

This is depressing, but feels accurate. How do we collectively get out of this mess?

Don’t give them money.

Re: The Synology End Game

#320

Post by kalleboo »

pjmlp wrote: post #194
TheCondor wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a fan of optical storage and its durability (with reasonable care.) But the problem is when you need to recover and have 20 Blu-ray Discs with important data scattered about, it takes days. Or when there is a specific piece of data you want/need and only have a vague idea of where it is/was in history. Maybe if those ultra capacity discs took hold but it looks like the era of optical is ending

Same applies to NAS, how many hours have you spent clicking around shared folders on company NAS / cloud storage, to track down where a specific set of files are actually located? Search isn't helpful if the stuff wasn't properly indexed.

> Search isn't helpful if the stuff wasn't properly indexed

Synology indexes file contents similar to Spotlight on the Mac.

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