Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs

IIRC the only devices supported in the NVMe slots are their own Synology branded ones at a steep markup. It would be nice if they backed down on that too but I bet they won't.

I guess this is a side note personally don’t think any of the Raspberry Pi hardware is worth it unless you are using the GPIO pins or any of those not-NAS not-PC type of functionality the Pi offers. I think for general compute it’s hard to make it make sense.

I think there are a whole lot of mini PC type of solutions that just make more overall sense.

Thanks for these links.

I've used Active Backup and never would have guessed it worked like that. Although, the MS365 security and permissions are so complex that I don't have a hope in hell of understanding them. The suggestions to do your own auditing in that post are moot because the target audience for something like a Synology doesn't have the resources or the ability to do that kind of assessment.

For me, I saw the permissions request along with the 'Synology Active Backup for MS365' app registration in my tenant and assumed everything was local to my tenant and NAS. The redirect back to the private LAN IP of the NAS also makes it seem like the communication is between the NAS and MS only.

I can't even tell if the issue has been fixed.

Ignoring the security stuff, my experience with Synology Active Backup for MS365 as a product hasn't been good for OneDrive backups. I have one setup where I reconcile the backup repo against a live (paused to get a consistent point in time) data set that's synced by the OneDrive client.

The Synology Active Backup for MS365 never reconciles correctly. Some files will randomly have things like '(1)' appended. Some files are simply missing. It seems to struggle with certain characters that Windows and OneDrive allow in filenames. For example, dots (.) appear to be problematic.

I monitor it and once it gets to the point where I think we'd suffer an intolerable amount of data loss if needing to restore, I delete it and restart it.

I would strongly encourage anyone relying on it to take the time to reconcile your OneDrive backups against a set of known good data. Pause your OneDrive syncing, restore the backup into a temporary folder, and use something like Beyond Compare [2] to compare the two directories. You can also map a network drive directly to storage location on the NAS which makes it very convenient to reconcile.

VEEAM used to have the same kind of issues with files missing for no reason, but they seem to be better lately if you ignore the way they append the version number to name of every (versioned) file restored (OMG why?). VEEAM has very slow restores and is much more difficult to reconcile due to the modified file names on restore.

Microsoft won't take responsibility for data loss "in the cloud" and the backup solutions all suck pretty bad IMO. Some of the blame for this kind of thing should fall to Microsoft. They've made everything too complex to be reliable.

1. https://oauth.net/2/grant-types/client-credentials/

2. https://www.scootersoftware.com/

Are there any other NASes out there that a) support ZFS/BTRFS, b) support different-sized drives in a single pool, and c) allow arbitrary in-place drive upgrades?

Last I checked, I believe I didn't find anything that satisfied all three. So DSM sits in a sweet spot, I think. Plus, plastic or not, Synology hardware just looks great.

IMHO: No. It's just a Linux box. It may be a Linux box with a neat GUI, but it's still a Linux box. It doesn't do anything particularly unique.

I run [almost all of] my home's network services on my present-day desktop rig, which... these days, runs Linux[1].

ZFS with RAID and snapshots? Backups for intermittently-connected stuff like my laptop? Plex and friends? Containers (oh my!)? Desktop stuff? Samba stuff? Yep. And other than GTA:V Online, it seems able to play everything I try in my Steam library with no particular effort on my part.

I don't notice when backups are happening. I don't notice when people are using Plex, and they don't notice when I'm gaming. It performs fine for absolutely everything that gets thrown at it -- concurrently.

I've got an inkling to upgrade the hardware soon. Unlike a "dedicated NAS appliance," I can accomplish this by buying bog-standard ATX hardware and stuffing it into the existing bog-standard ATX case -- just as people in DIY circles did for ~decades before PCs became more appliance-like (and/or fishtank-like).

Once that's done, I may think about doing some 10GbE stuff and turning the old hardware into a more-dedicated NAS. Separating the storage from the applications, in this way, sounds fun. But it won't improve performance -- it'll just be a homelab exercise that I'll live with and learn from (and may elect to reverse).

All those words, just to iterate that I have zero interest in buying a snaky-feeling Synology box. It doesn't give me anything that I want that I'm not already doing.

If your retired gaming PC is doing everything you want, then: Keep doing that (unless/until power consumption or something else becomes a concern).

[1]: For most of a decade before I decided to go back to using a Linux desktop, I still ran Linux -- but always with the desktop portion being Windows running in a VM (with its own dedicated GPU and USB adapter and...). That was fun, too, but I got tired of working primarily with Windows.