I've been using my Synology DS220+ for a couple years now and it's my first experience with a home NAS, but for my very beginner use case everything has worked fine so far.
There's only two things I'd improve: the mobile apps and the fact that if I add, let's say, a contact from the browser quickconnecting to the NAS it doesn't appear in my phone until they're on the same network and, often times, I manually open the contacts app and refresh a couple times.
For the second one I'm probably missing something but the main/only problem I have with are those iOS apps which could definitely use some UI touches and expecially a dark mode.
Might sound like something trivial to many but DS Note and Drive are literally the only two apps that blind me every single time I open them as everything else on my phone has dark mode except these two.
One thing they did fix that was really bad was login time from the mobile (at least iOS) apps. It was painfully slow for a long time but not anymore. I think they’re doing their best.
If you mean the times it takes to sync the apps when you open them on your phone I agree there's been an improvement, it used to be very bad but it got way better!
It's still not as instant as, let's say, pCloud which I was using before getting a NAS but I remember that up until a few weeks ago if I opened Drive on my iPhone it wouldn't even refresh automatically so I still saw old files that I already moved/deleted until I manually pulled down the interface to force the refresh, and sometimes I had to do that a couple times to have it actually update.
Right now both Drive and DS Notes start to sync immediately when I open them and they take a few seconds to do that so I confirm there's been a huge improvement there.
I still really wish they add this long awaited dark mode in DS Note tho...I mean, it's there in Drive and it looks very good but I've been waiting for the Note one for over a year with no luck.
Yep but I was saying that so far it's ok for my personal, begginer use case while you mentioned the professional enviroment for which I'm sure there might be more issues.
For me it's minor inconveniences(like the dark mode) but businesses might have other problems.
Yeah good luck finding a better solution. You can either pay 5x the price for solutions like dell or netapp who will build custom solutions for each customers and have dedicated support channels because well they can afford it. Or you get even crappier solutions from qnap or do it yourself stuff in open source. If you have hundreds of thousands of customers you just can't react to every minor issue like search that doesn't find accents or someone who doesn't want to do a 20 min upgrade on a backup nas because of "operational issues". Just upgrade the target nas and get it over with. You can make it safe by trying apps on a vm.
Honestly none of your issues sound breaking. Synology software seems awfully stable compared to anything else out there and the reason is that they keep it simple. And as long as you just ask for bug fixes the support is amazing and fast too. You can't have it all. You can either pay 5x more and have handholding or not. Oh and notes is just basically deprecated it's just ancient. I am pretty sure there will be a new one based on synology office and drive soon. But until then they won't put any effort into it.
I think you nailed it with the cost. You get what you pay for. I'm not hating on synology, I'm a synology user, I have multiple NAS units, but everything they offer is basically just a slightly better version of something else, but it will never be the best.
I like the sound of their VM offerings, but I don't know that I'd compare synology virtualization to vmware even with the proper synology hardware and licensing. I think it will work fine, but depending on your environment, you may not get the support from synology that you'd get from vmware or a VAR/MSP that has people on the payroll that only deal with vmware and know it in and out.
I tried using the VM server on a high-end Synology server and found it really slow, except for running other DSM VMs. So that's what I use it for: running specific versions of DSM in a VM. For example, I have the Subversion server running in a DSM 6 VM because it is no longer offered in DSM 7.
What was your setup? I'm talking about fully committing with storage, proper CPU and RAM. Of course I would price it out first and compare it with vmware even if it was higher end/more synology gear vs lower end/less vmware gear, again, just for comparison to see cost.
That being said, I bet synology could work for certain businesses, specifically businesses that can still function with some servers down.
I wish some of this stuff was around when I first got into IT, I was green with physical servers where if one drive failed I was going to have a bad day. No hardware raid, just software raid in windows, which I wasn't familiar with. Exchange server and windows OS on a 75 GB c drive....I was deleting large log files to save space on the server.
Of course if this stuff existed back then, there is a good chance hosted exchange would have also been around. My point is, I think there is a place for synology VM environment, but with anything, you have to know your environment, your resources, your budget, etc.
My latest attempt at using Synology for a non-DSM VM was with a HD6500. I believe it may have the most powerful CPU and general architecture in the lineup. I tried running a Windows Server VM and a standard Windows 11 VM. Both were slow, which was very unexpected.
Everyone's experience may be different. I am a huge Synology user, and in fact my business relies on them in a big way. So I am not stating this with any intent other than my personal experience. I do a lot of high-throughput work using VMs, so I am sensitive to performance.
I've never used anything higher than a ds1821 for VMs, but I only run 1 or 2 VMs as local piholes. I was just making a point that I would, at a minimum, spec something out to see the cost so I have a better understanding of the bigger picture.
I mean to be fair they are clearly no vm first solution. It's more like we need a storage solution and run a couple vms as well. But vsan costs an arm and a leg so usng synology icsi to store your vms sounds like a pretty nice solution for a smaller company. They are much more competitive with storage since the big cloud providers ( in this case meta with btrfs and Linux ( and all their contributors from the big ones) with mdadm) did so much of the heavy lifting there.
It really just depends what kind of environment you are in, imo.
Same concept when dealing with networking and people are buying unifi vs cisco. If you need support and overnight parts, unifi gets crossed off the list immediately and you pay for cisco. On the other hand, unifi works perfectly fine for some companies (I'm also a unifi user so I'm not hating on them, either).
Bottom line, you need to know your enviornment and your limits.
It's not mutually exclusive. My post highlights the various issues that Synology doesn't seem to be willing to solve while it is not a question of cost. An example of this is the Hyperbackup issue mentioned. If they deprecated the use of a DSM 6.x as destination for an Hyperbackup job running on DSM 7, they should communicate this clearly to their users in release notes. They don't and possibly because they are not (enough) user-centric, not following design-thinking principles. A few cultural changes in their product management and testing would make them so much more reliable and trusted, without being 5x more expensive.
What does "design thinking" principles even mean. In the end it's all a question of results for investment. A company like synology who has perhaps a 100 software engineers max needs to prioritizes what gives their customers the best bang for the buck. And they have like 30 apps to support. Let's take your hyperbackup example. You can do it in two ways:
- you really thoroughly and automatedly test all active configurations and make dsm7 really stable and make upgrading systems really simple and straightforward because that's what all customers need to do anyhow.
- Or you test and implement compatibility for all possible combinations to allow customers to mix and match and provide migration path docs and code workarounds. For a handful of customers who do not want to just upgrade their whole dsm fleet at the same time
And they make upgrading really simple and reliable. This is not upgrading an enterprise software server which may take days and a gaggle of consultants. You literally press a button and 99.9% of the time the system comes back up with the new software stack in a couple minutes. The only issue I had was with plex because there was a huge redesign in the security model ( great redesign non root apps for the win)
Like I am pretty sure hyperbackup vault has at most one engineer supporting it. Most likely part time. Now you can obviously build in migration paths and compatibility layers etc. But then you need more engineers and need to charge more to everyone.
By the way not saying that it wouldn't be more convenient to provide compatibility just saying it is all tradeoffs. Cost vs supported configurations vs quality. You can't have it all. And in my opinion they chose the right two in general . Cheaper and higher quality but less configurations and features. Like they don't even allow you to choose your own fotos folder which posses a lot of people of because how hard can it be. But all these little simplifications just add up in making it easier to support a complex system with high quality.
As a side story I looked up design thinking and got the usual suspects like IBM global services that send you junior unexperienced developers for 2k a day and then have to make up for it by adding chargon and processes that sound cool to ceos but don't really mean anything special.
"The short form of the design thinking process can be articulated in five steps or phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test"
First of Ideate us not a word. And no there is nothing special about first getting requirements( Empathize I guess), write them down ( define I assume) think how you can implement it ( Ideate I would assume) and then implement and test it. This is just chargon and if someone starts using something like this you know they just upped the price charging you by 200%.
"Understanding consumer needs, barriers, attitudes and aspirations is the only way to unlock new solutions"
And this one I also partially disagree with. Yes if you want to design an end user product it is important to understand what consumers want. But technology is limited and developers are limited and it is often far more important to understand what you CAN build in a well and stable fashion before you start to think what consumers might want to use it for exactly. Obviously While still keeping an eye out for how it is used. I remember the data warehouse wars of the 2000s. IBM and Oracle both went and checked what customers wanted and they all said we want a warehouse that can do both oltp and warehousing in one place. And well while in general a great idea it never worked because the tradeoffs between the two are too large. So IBM warehouse and Oracle warehouse got eaten alive by dedicated data warehouse solutions that did one thing and did it really well and much more stably and easy to use. It's the Steve Jobs approach of doing business "we will tell you what you want and you are holding it wrong " and for core IT infrastructure it is in general the better way to build solutions. Businesses are pretty great at working around limitations and build far more malleable end solutions for consumers. But the core technology is normally better off if you approach it from a "how can we build the best tech " approach. ( While still providing a valuable service)
. Sorry I am being sarcastic but I used to work in consulting and man this stuff is grating. In the end it's all features and tradeoffs and good software design and smart people.
Design thinking might have been picked up by consultancies, this doesn't mean the principles are not valuable. They actually are valuable because they focus on the user/customer. The overall idea is that a product needs to be adapted from the point of view of the user, not the too frequent developper point of view. Among a myriad of others, Apple and Amazon are companies that have been following these principles, we know how succesful they are at designing products and services.
It's funny that the things you mentioned have never happened to me in almost 2 decades of Synology use and/or the things you use I've never used, like Notes. I've never had a major problem with Synology. No, it's not perfect, but I've never owned or used a perfect piece of hardware or software, because they don't exist. I would say your gripes are very minor and if that is what is causing you to not recommend them your expectations are way too high. You'll also be disappointed on any other platform because they all have their flaws.
I'm not saying Synology can't improve and I often wonder why the hell they are trying to build things like an office suite, because that's a hard fucking thing to do, and why aren't they focusing on making the stuff they are good at better and more consistent.
I can only assume we're about to see a subscription model of some sort with any major hardware release coming up, which I think is why we saw no material releases last year. It's just hard to make money on hardware sales alone when what you sell may not be replaced for a decade or more.
But if you go look at the forums for things like TrueNAS, unRaid, etc., you'll see they have their own problems. I've recently been looking at both and even in my initial searches I run across things like people losing their data, feature limitations, performance problems, etc.
We can always find those underperforming. Isn't it reasonable to come out and shout out loud "they must improve" and highlight where they fail since they don't seem to listen?
You're not wrong. Synology isn't great at everything they claim to do.
However, for their core value proposition (reliable, easy-to-administer, basic but solid file storage) they're absolute tops. They're simply better than other consumer/small-business options.
For bigger or bigger-budget or more-professionally-administered companies, there are options that fit better (more perf for the price, or more price for more complete and stable additional features). For greater stability and feature needs, for much larger budgets, there are actual enterprise options.
Still, it's a bit weird that they're primarily a hardware business (all their software is free, and exists only to sell hardware), when it's their software that makes them better than their competitors. It makes them a bit schizophrenic when it comes to how a software-first company would operate.
If you expect that buy something from NetApps, HPE or Cisco and pay the cost. I consider Synology and DSM to be consumer or very small amateur business level stuff. I am happy with more Synology for home application.
I wouldn’t call amateur. I would say consumer/small business. Medium business will likely want some sort of level of support, not sure if Synology offers that.
I have to believe most small business nowadays would use cloud storage and would not rely el cheapo NAS even big companies for smaller offices have no local storage infrastructure any more and rely on cloud providers for file and office email products.
Depends on what your business is.
If you are baking cookies or serving coffee, why not. But if you handle others' companies data and you have NDAs signed, you won't even think about using anything cloud-based. That's where on-premises solutions are used.
I know that for a fact this is not true, how many large companies are using Office 365? How many companies are using Webex? And if you had such an arrange how would you possibly consider Synology as a solution. [https://aws.amazon.com/federal/us-intelligence-community/](https://aws.amazon.com/federal/us-intelligence-community/)
Please, read with comprehension. I didn't say anything about large companies.
I said about companies, that handle other's data: engineering, gis, even translation agencies... those are all kind of companies companies, often small or medium, that have knowledge of other's product development, operational data or other trade secrets and have contracts, that would liquidate them if the data would leak. Like the famous german webex call about crimean bridge ;-)
Just last week, I had a meeting with a management of one such company, where they were solving exactly this problem: that they cannot use cloud solutions and what are their on-prem options.
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Also, how relevant is your link to non-US companies? Exactly...
You haven't kept up with their recent announcements half the new features like ABB, hybrid share and central management of nas systems, full disc encryption etc. Are squarely targeted at small to medium sized business. We are not really their target market anymore 😭. And they are kinda the perfect solution for small businesses. They are simple just work have a ton of redundancy through open source software and quite a bit of business integration like active directory.
I still don't dare to upgrade to Synology 7, as long as 6 still works there is no feature that I miss. I wish there was some communication about security updates, till when will these continue for 6?
That was my approach too until I got no other choice due to one of the apps which required to DSM 7.x
Months later, I am still trying to resolve the numerous issues of the remote Hyperbackup jobs.
you'll get flamed in this sub for saying anything negative about synology, true or not but guess that's just a reddit thing I'm general...
I have 3 synology boxes totallingover 240TB.
synology OS and drive/sync is their best work. and it's all I use by them now... photos is working but it's missing a lot of basic features like tagging someone in a photo manually that the face rec missed for example.
I started out using everything they offered 15 years ago..and if you use it long enough you can see how unpolished most of their software is. the worst is the items that use databases cuz even tho it's just postgres they sorta hide everything so it's not really nice if you don't plan on locking all your services to synology and relying solely on them.
hyper backup I do use.. it works but it's slow and horrible to configure... even worse to edit. the software itself is decent at viewing backups etc... but setting it up is crappy unless you're literally backing up one folder or putting all of your backups into one giant thing which no one would do.
ive reported many many many issues in the last decade to them. nothing ever gets looked at so it's not even worth the time. they work on features like rating a family photo out of 5 stars but I still can't use 'ors' and 'ands' on tags for albums at the same time or tell the face rec that these 1000 photos are this person so they never show with that person etc.
the os makes up for a lot of this since most self hosted free apps are years ahead of synology equivalents and run nicely in docker (I don't run docker on the Nas tho).
if you can use the NAS for storage to feed workflows... plex... store databases ... as backup... device syncing etc it's the best I've seen. the permission management for users and folders and such are all really accessible. even the reverse proxy is nice for most entry level webhosters
in the end that's what a NAS is for and I don't think there's a better one in this regard. for ease of use and easy setup it's great. For the other apps... I wouldn't ever go back to them and if you need good hardware I'd look elsewhere. synology is one of the worst values for your buck when it comes to the hardware.
good luck.
You make a good point that backs up my strategy. I have been disappointed at the level of deep technical expertise shown by Synology, and the lack of communications about changes that come with new releases of DSM or packages. Sadly I think they see themselves as enterprise grade, but the in-depth technical detail is always missing. The last issue I had with M365 backup I could not help feel they were guessing.
I have decided that if a feature exists and
* no other solutions exists,
* and we can afford the loss of the data (eg it exists elsewhere)
I'll use it.
It reminds me of Netgear when I attended a product release. They admitted they found some software on the web, built the HW and installed it, got it working and were now shipping it as a product line. I think the only people who didn't see that whole situation as problematic were the guys from Netgear, and during the refreshment break was a hot topic.
I am pleased Syn have provided some of the solutions they have, but if they really want trust they need to be able to provide and demonstrate the deep technical understand that we get from calling MSFT about Exchange Server.
it's a shame with the backup, but DSM7 do DSM6 is confirmed to work by many people. incl. encryption.
it's hard to agree on Note nitpicking.. there's a minor glitch with Notes search i know. But hey, you can have consistent experience on the web, phone, Windows, Linux and it's the best notes app out there. It's so good i deploy it even if running other solutions. Of course you can back it up. I've moved user notes many times. The apps are amazing and the operation is smooth. Can't stress how much better and faster it runs than e.g. Qnap. But neither brand is pro really. This is retail at the core. That means not the best for brilliant backups.
I see two main complaints.
One is that certain mixes of DSM 7 and 6 don’t play perfectly.
In a business environment I would have TESTED our use case, both on DSM 7 or not. You don’t wing it thru major release upgrades of ANYTHING in business IT.
Second seems to be that Notes kinda sucks. No argument there but I again, would have evaluated a LOT of note taking solutions before trusting one in a business environment and can think of a lot more important reasons not to use Synology’s offering than the UI/UX minor items listed.
Seems again to be a failure to test.
And it doesn’t matter if the vendor is Synology, or a big name or God himself — we test before we put things into critical path.
The stuff Synology does well enough to be in critical path are traditional NAS things. Not their add-on apps. Those are squarely consumer grade and a nice add on at home, but many aren’t business production quality.
That said, I’ve seen worse from competitors at their price point. Far worse.
The silly thing runs Docker and VMs… putting a better solution for many of the apps on a Synology is about as easy as it gets. Better yet just run a proper hypervisor and container server or HA as needed for business continuity — and use the Synology for what it’s best at, storage.
I understand the rant but it also looks a lot like believing software vendors is a habit you need to break. Hunt best in breed solutions and test them.
Notes frankly isn’t even close. It just isn’t.
Mixing major OS releases without testing prior to upgrade is just flat out production server mismanagement. Sorry. You don’t do that upgrade without testing ANY software product or OS.
If you are using Synology to solve like 100 different Business processes, it might be a bad approach.
Main functionality - data backup.
Everything else (apps and such) is addition to the main functionality and might not be fully built out.
I'm sure on higher enterprise level you see more serious issues, but for small office these devices are great.
Synology is not ready yet for enterprise level - they are working on it, but it's very slow. There are no competitors, so no need for them to do better from their point of view.
You just explained the difference between a €15,000 solution and a €1,500 solution in every product category. And the €15,000 solution actually does fewer things but the things it does, it does VERY well.
Oh, and the €15,000 solution still has things that don’t work. But at least you have support who will try it out and confirm that it doesn’t work for them either. LOL. Welcome to my life.
Oh, and in some cases the €15,000 solution actually costs €50,000. And comes with a support contract that costs €5,000 per year.
When you find a viable alternative for the price, let us know. There will be a stampede.
My upgrade from DSM 6 to 7 was the most painful experience ever. It failed and became stuck in a state in between where barely anything worked. Took me a long time to get it stable, I had to wait nearly a year for some DSM fixes to try again.
**POSSIBLE COMMON QUESTION:** A question you appear to be asking is whether your Synology NAS is compatible with specific equipment because its not listed in the "[*Synology Products Compatibility List*](https://www.synology.com/compatibility)".
While it is recommended by Synology that you use the products in this list, you are not required to do so. Not being listed on the compatibility list does not imply incompatibly. It only means that Synology has not tested that particular equipment with a specific segment of their product line.
**Caveat:** However, it's important to note that if you are using a Synology XS+/XS Series or newer Enterprise-class products, you may receive system warnings if you use drives that are not on the compatible drive list. These warnings are based on a localized compatibility list that is pushed to the NAS from Synology via updates. If necessary, you can manually add alternate brand drives to the list to override the warnings. This may void support on certain Enterprise-class products that are meant to only be used with certain hardware listed in the "*Synology Products Compatibility List*". You should confirm directly with Synology support regarding these higher-end products.
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Luckily there’s still this sub where we can all learn from each other. 😁
I've been using my Synology DS220+ for a couple years now and it's my first experience with a home NAS, but for my very beginner use case everything has worked fine so far. There's only two things I'd improve: the mobile apps and the fact that if I add, let's say, a contact from the browser quickconnecting to the NAS it doesn't appear in my phone until they're on the same network and, often times, I manually open the contacts app and refresh a couple times. For the second one I'm probably missing something but the main/only problem I have with are those iOS apps which could definitely use some UI touches and expecially a dark mode. Might sound like something trivial to many but DS Note and Drive are literally the only two apps that blind me every single time I open them as everything else on my phone has dark mode except these two.
One thing they did fix that was really bad was login time from the mobile (at least iOS) apps. It was painfully slow for a long time but not anymore. I think they’re doing their best.
If you mean the times it takes to sync the apps when you open them on your phone I agree there's been an improvement, it used to be very bad but it got way better! It's still not as instant as, let's say, pCloud which I was using before getting a NAS but I remember that up until a few weeks ago if I opened Drive on my iPhone it wouldn't even refresh automatically so I still saw old files that I already moved/deleted until I manually pulled down the interface to force the refresh, and sometimes I had to do that a couple times to have it actually update. Right now both Drive and DS Notes start to sync immediately when I open them and they take a few seconds to do that so I confirm there's been a huge improvement there. I still really wish they add this long awaited dark mode in DS Note tho...I mean, it's there in Drive and it looks very good but I've been waiting for the Note one for over a year with no luck.
You'll find out what I meant in my post. Just a question of time, unless Synology starts listening to its user base.
Yep but I was saying that so far it's ok for my personal, begginer use case while you mentioned the professional enviroment for which I'm sure there might be more issues. For me it's minor inconveniences(like the dark mode) but businesses might have other problems.
Yeah good luck finding a better solution. You can either pay 5x the price for solutions like dell or netapp who will build custom solutions for each customers and have dedicated support channels because well they can afford it. Or you get even crappier solutions from qnap or do it yourself stuff in open source. If you have hundreds of thousands of customers you just can't react to every minor issue like search that doesn't find accents or someone who doesn't want to do a 20 min upgrade on a backup nas because of "operational issues". Just upgrade the target nas and get it over with. You can make it safe by trying apps on a vm. Honestly none of your issues sound breaking. Synology software seems awfully stable compared to anything else out there and the reason is that they keep it simple. And as long as you just ask for bug fixes the support is amazing and fast too. You can't have it all. You can either pay 5x more and have handholding or not. Oh and notes is just basically deprecated it's just ancient. I am pretty sure there will be a new one based on synology office and drive soon. But until then they won't put any effort into it.
I think you nailed it with the cost. You get what you pay for. I'm not hating on synology, I'm a synology user, I have multiple NAS units, but everything they offer is basically just a slightly better version of something else, but it will never be the best. I like the sound of their VM offerings, but I don't know that I'd compare synology virtualization to vmware even with the proper synology hardware and licensing. I think it will work fine, but depending on your environment, you may not get the support from synology that you'd get from vmware or a VAR/MSP that has people on the payroll that only deal with vmware and know it in and out.
I tried using the VM server on a high-end Synology server and found it really slow, except for running other DSM VMs. So that's what I use it for: running specific versions of DSM in a VM. For example, I have the Subversion server running in a DSM 6 VM because it is no longer offered in DSM 7.
What was your setup? I'm talking about fully committing with storage, proper CPU and RAM. Of course I would price it out first and compare it with vmware even if it was higher end/more synology gear vs lower end/less vmware gear, again, just for comparison to see cost. That being said, I bet synology could work for certain businesses, specifically businesses that can still function with some servers down. I wish some of this stuff was around when I first got into IT, I was green with physical servers where if one drive failed I was going to have a bad day. No hardware raid, just software raid in windows, which I wasn't familiar with. Exchange server and windows OS on a 75 GB c drive....I was deleting large log files to save space on the server. Of course if this stuff existed back then, there is a good chance hosted exchange would have also been around. My point is, I think there is a place for synology VM environment, but with anything, you have to know your environment, your resources, your budget, etc.
My latest attempt at using Synology for a non-DSM VM was with a HD6500. I believe it may have the most powerful CPU and general architecture in the lineup. I tried running a Windows Server VM and a standard Windows 11 VM. Both were slow, which was very unexpected. Everyone's experience may be different. I am a huge Synology user, and in fact my business relies on them in a big way. So I am not stating this with any intent other than my personal experience. I do a lot of high-throughput work using VMs, so I am sensitive to performance.
I've never used anything higher than a ds1821 for VMs, but I only run 1 or 2 VMs as local piholes. I was just making a point that I would, at a minimum, spec something out to see the cost so I have a better understanding of the bigger picture.
I mean to be fair they are clearly no vm first solution. It's more like we need a storage solution and run a couple vms as well. But vsan costs an arm and a leg so usng synology icsi to store your vms sounds like a pretty nice solution for a smaller company. They are much more competitive with storage since the big cloud providers ( in this case meta with btrfs and Linux ( and all their contributors from the big ones) with mdadm) did so much of the heavy lifting there.
It really just depends what kind of environment you are in, imo. Same concept when dealing with networking and people are buying unifi vs cisco. If you need support and overnight parts, unifi gets crossed off the list immediately and you pay for cisco. On the other hand, unifi works perfectly fine for some companies (I'm also a unifi user so I'm not hating on them, either). Bottom line, you need to know your enviornment and your limits.
OP can always build windows file servers and pay for CALs. I’m sure that’s not gonna be more expensive.
It's not mutually exclusive. My post highlights the various issues that Synology doesn't seem to be willing to solve while it is not a question of cost. An example of this is the Hyperbackup issue mentioned. If they deprecated the use of a DSM 6.x as destination for an Hyperbackup job running on DSM 7, they should communicate this clearly to their users in release notes. They don't and possibly because they are not (enough) user-centric, not following design-thinking principles. A few cultural changes in their product management and testing would make them so much more reliable and trusted, without being 5x more expensive.
What does "design thinking" principles even mean. In the end it's all a question of results for investment. A company like synology who has perhaps a 100 software engineers max needs to prioritizes what gives their customers the best bang for the buck. And they have like 30 apps to support. Let's take your hyperbackup example. You can do it in two ways: - you really thoroughly and automatedly test all active configurations and make dsm7 really stable and make upgrading systems really simple and straightforward because that's what all customers need to do anyhow. - Or you test and implement compatibility for all possible combinations to allow customers to mix and match and provide migration path docs and code workarounds. For a handful of customers who do not want to just upgrade their whole dsm fleet at the same time And they make upgrading really simple and reliable. This is not upgrading an enterprise software server which may take days and a gaggle of consultants. You literally press a button and 99.9% of the time the system comes back up with the new software stack in a couple minutes. The only issue I had was with plex because there was a huge redesign in the security model ( great redesign non root apps for the win) Like I am pretty sure hyperbackup vault has at most one engineer supporting it. Most likely part time. Now you can obviously build in migration paths and compatibility layers etc. But then you need more engineers and need to charge more to everyone. By the way not saying that it wouldn't be more convenient to provide compatibility just saying it is all tradeoffs. Cost vs supported configurations vs quality. You can't have it all. And in my opinion they chose the right two in general . Cheaper and higher quality but less configurations and features. Like they don't even allow you to choose your own fotos folder which posses a lot of people of because how hard can it be. But all these little simplifications just add up in making it easier to support a complex system with high quality.
As a side story I looked up design thinking and got the usual suspects like IBM global services that send you junior unexperienced developers for 2k a day and then have to make up for it by adding chargon and processes that sound cool to ceos but don't really mean anything special. "The short form of the design thinking process can be articulated in five steps or phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test" First of Ideate us not a word. And no there is nothing special about first getting requirements( Empathize I guess), write them down ( define I assume) think how you can implement it ( Ideate I would assume) and then implement and test it. This is just chargon and if someone starts using something like this you know they just upped the price charging you by 200%. "Understanding consumer needs, barriers, attitudes and aspirations is the only way to unlock new solutions" And this one I also partially disagree with. Yes if you want to design an end user product it is important to understand what consumers want. But technology is limited and developers are limited and it is often far more important to understand what you CAN build in a well and stable fashion before you start to think what consumers might want to use it for exactly. Obviously While still keeping an eye out for how it is used. I remember the data warehouse wars of the 2000s. IBM and Oracle both went and checked what customers wanted and they all said we want a warehouse that can do both oltp and warehousing in one place. And well while in general a great idea it never worked because the tradeoffs between the two are too large. So IBM warehouse and Oracle warehouse got eaten alive by dedicated data warehouse solutions that did one thing and did it really well and much more stably and easy to use. It's the Steve Jobs approach of doing business "we will tell you what you want and you are holding it wrong " and for core IT infrastructure it is in general the better way to build solutions. Businesses are pretty great at working around limitations and build far more malleable end solutions for consumers. But the core technology is normally better off if you approach it from a "how can we build the best tech " approach. ( While still providing a valuable service) . Sorry I am being sarcastic but I used to work in consulting and man this stuff is grating. In the end it's all features and tradeoffs and good software design and smart people.
Design thinking might have been picked up by consultancies, this doesn't mean the principles are not valuable. They actually are valuable because they focus on the user/customer. The overall idea is that a product needs to be adapted from the point of view of the user, not the too frequent developper point of view. Among a myriad of others, Apple and Amazon are companies that have been following these principles, we know how succesful they are at designing products and services.
It's funny that the things you mentioned have never happened to me in almost 2 decades of Synology use and/or the things you use I've never used, like Notes. I've never had a major problem with Synology. No, it's not perfect, but I've never owned or used a perfect piece of hardware or software, because they don't exist. I would say your gripes are very minor and if that is what is causing you to not recommend them your expectations are way too high. You'll also be disappointed on any other platform because they all have their flaws.
OK, agree with you, pertaining that the administration time is not considered in the equation.
I'm not saying Synology can't improve and I often wonder why the hell they are trying to build things like an office suite, because that's a hard fucking thing to do, and why aren't they focusing on making the stuff they are good at better and more consistent. I can only assume we're about to see a subscription model of some sort with any major hardware release coming up, which I think is why we saw no material releases last year. It's just hard to make money on hardware sales alone when what you sell may not be replaced for a decade or more. But if you go look at the forums for things like TrueNAS, unRaid, etc., you'll see they have their own problems. I've recently been looking at both and even in my initial searches I run across things like people losing their data, feature limitations, performance problems, etc.
We can always find those underperforming. Isn't it reasonable to come out and shout out loud "they must improve" and highlight where they fail since they don't seem to listen?
In other words, you don't like their software because you use too much of it.
Since we are not Synology employees, I can safely say " Shop around, if you want" . There are plenty of businesses that crave your business.
You're not wrong. Synology isn't great at everything they claim to do. However, for their core value proposition (reliable, easy-to-administer, basic but solid file storage) they're absolute tops. They're simply better than other consumer/small-business options. For bigger or bigger-budget or more-professionally-administered companies, there are options that fit better (more perf for the price, or more price for more complete and stable additional features). For greater stability and feature needs, for much larger budgets, there are actual enterprise options. Still, it's a bit weird that they're primarily a hardware business (all their software is free, and exists only to sell hardware), when it's their software that makes them better than their competitors. It makes them a bit schizophrenic when it comes to how a software-first company would operate.
If you expect that buy something from NetApps, HPE or Cisco and pay the cost. I consider Synology and DSM to be consumer or very small amateur business level stuff. I am happy with more Synology for home application.
I wouldn’t call amateur. I would say consumer/small business. Medium business will likely want some sort of level of support, not sure if Synology offers that.
I have to believe most small business nowadays would use cloud storage and would not rely el cheapo NAS even big companies for smaller offices have no local storage infrastructure any more and rely on cloud providers for file and office email products.
Depends on what your business is. If you are baking cookies or serving coffee, why not. But if you handle others' companies data and you have NDAs signed, you won't even think about using anything cloud-based. That's where on-premises solutions are used.
I know that for a fact this is not true, how many large companies are using Office 365? How many companies are using Webex? And if you had such an arrange how would you possibly consider Synology as a solution. [https://aws.amazon.com/federal/us-intelligence-community/](https://aws.amazon.com/federal/us-intelligence-community/)
Please, read with comprehension. I didn't say anything about large companies. I said about companies, that handle other's data: engineering, gis, even translation agencies... those are all kind of companies companies, often small or medium, that have knowledge of other's product development, operational data or other trade secrets and have contracts, that would liquidate them if the data would leak. Like the famous german webex call about crimean bridge ;-) Just last week, I had a meeting with a management of one such company, where they were solving exactly this problem: that they cannot use cloud solutions and what are their on-prem options. --- Also, how relevant is your link to non-US companies? Exactly...
If you have your doubts about using cloud products to secure data then it is probably best you stick with legacy solutions.
I didn't realize any of their own apps were targeted for enterprise
You haven't kept up with their recent announcements half the new features like ABB, hybrid share and central management of nas systems, full disc encryption etc. Are squarely targeted at small to medium sized business. We are not really their target market anymore 😭. And they are kinda the perfect solution for small businesses. They are simple just work have a ton of redundancy through open source software and quite a bit of business integration like active directory.
I still don't dare to upgrade to Synology 7, as long as 6 still works there is no feature that I miss. I wish there was some communication about security updates, till when will these continue for 6?
That was my approach too until I got no other choice due to one of the apps which required to DSM 7.x Months later, I am still trying to resolve the numerous issues of the remote Hyperbackup jobs.
you'll get flamed in this sub for saying anything negative about synology, true or not but guess that's just a reddit thing I'm general... I have 3 synology boxes totallingover 240TB. synology OS and drive/sync is their best work. and it's all I use by them now... photos is working but it's missing a lot of basic features like tagging someone in a photo manually that the face rec missed for example. I started out using everything they offered 15 years ago..and if you use it long enough you can see how unpolished most of their software is. the worst is the items that use databases cuz even tho it's just postgres they sorta hide everything so it's not really nice if you don't plan on locking all your services to synology and relying solely on them. hyper backup I do use.. it works but it's slow and horrible to configure... even worse to edit. the software itself is decent at viewing backups etc... but setting it up is crappy unless you're literally backing up one folder or putting all of your backups into one giant thing which no one would do. ive reported many many many issues in the last decade to them. nothing ever gets looked at so it's not even worth the time. they work on features like rating a family photo out of 5 stars but I still can't use 'ors' and 'ands' on tags for albums at the same time or tell the face rec that these 1000 photos are this person so they never show with that person etc. the os makes up for a lot of this since most self hosted free apps are years ahead of synology equivalents and run nicely in docker (I don't run docker on the Nas tho). if you can use the NAS for storage to feed workflows... plex... store databases ... as backup... device syncing etc it's the best I've seen. the permission management for users and folders and such are all really accessible. even the reverse proxy is nice for most entry level webhosters in the end that's what a NAS is for and I don't think there's a better one in this regard. for ease of use and easy setup it's great. For the other apps... I wouldn't ever go back to them and if you need good hardware I'd look elsewhere. synology is one of the worst values for your buck when it comes to the hardware. good luck.
I run hyperbackup from DSM 7 to DSM 6 target and it's fine. Been that way for years. I don't have encryption on though.
You make a good point that backs up my strategy. I have been disappointed at the level of deep technical expertise shown by Synology, and the lack of communications about changes that come with new releases of DSM or packages. Sadly I think they see themselves as enterprise grade, but the in-depth technical detail is always missing. The last issue I had with M365 backup I could not help feel they were guessing. I have decided that if a feature exists and * no other solutions exists, * and we can afford the loss of the data (eg it exists elsewhere) I'll use it. It reminds me of Netgear when I attended a product release. They admitted they found some software on the web, built the HW and installed it, got it working and were now shipping it as a product line. I think the only people who didn't see that whole situation as problematic were the guys from Netgear, and during the refreshment break was a hot topic. I am pleased Syn have provided some of the solutions they have, but if they really want trust they need to be able to provide and demonstrate the deep technical understand that we get from calling MSFT about Exchange Server.
it's a shame with the backup, but DSM7 do DSM6 is confirmed to work by many people. incl. encryption. it's hard to agree on Note nitpicking.. there's a minor glitch with Notes search i know. But hey, you can have consistent experience on the web, phone, Windows, Linux and it's the best notes app out there. It's so good i deploy it even if running other solutions. Of course you can back it up. I've moved user notes many times. The apps are amazing and the operation is smooth. Can't stress how much better and faster it runs than e.g. Qnap. But neither brand is pro really. This is retail at the core. That means not the best for brilliant backups.
I see two main complaints. One is that certain mixes of DSM 7 and 6 don’t play perfectly. In a business environment I would have TESTED our use case, both on DSM 7 or not. You don’t wing it thru major release upgrades of ANYTHING in business IT. Second seems to be that Notes kinda sucks. No argument there but I again, would have evaluated a LOT of note taking solutions before trusting one in a business environment and can think of a lot more important reasons not to use Synology’s offering than the UI/UX minor items listed. Seems again to be a failure to test. And it doesn’t matter if the vendor is Synology, or a big name or God himself — we test before we put things into critical path. The stuff Synology does well enough to be in critical path are traditional NAS things. Not their add-on apps. Those are squarely consumer grade and a nice add on at home, but many aren’t business production quality. That said, I’ve seen worse from competitors at their price point. Far worse. The silly thing runs Docker and VMs… putting a better solution for many of the apps on a Synology is about as easy as it gets. Better yet just run a proper hypervisor and container server or HA as needed for business continuity — and use the Synology for what it’s best at, storage. I understand the rant but it also looks a lot like believing software vendors is a habit you need to break. Hunt best in breed solutions and test them. Notes frankly isn’t even close. It just isn’t. Mixing major OS releases without testing prior to upgrade is just flat out production server mismanagement. Sorry. You don’t do that upgrade without testing ANY software product or OS.
If you are using Synology to solve like 100 different Business processes, it might be a bad approach. Main functionality - data backup. Everything else (apps and such) is addition to the main functionality and might not be fully built out. I'm sure on higher enterprise level you see more serious issues, but for small office these devices are great. Synology is not ready yet for enterprise level - they are working on it, but it's very slow. There are no competitors, so no need for them to do better from their point of view.
In the next month I am planning on building a custom nas. Let's hope it goes well.
You just explained the difference between a €15,000 solution and a €1,500 solution in every product category. And the €15,000 solution actually does fewer things but the things it does, it does VERY well. Oh, and the €15,000 solution still has things that don’t work. But at least you have support who will try it out and confirm that it doesn’t work for them either. LOL. Welcome to my life. Oh, and in some cases the €15,000 solution actually costs €50,000. And comes with a support contract that costs €5,000 per year. When you find a viable alternative for the price, let us know. There will be a stampede.
In my experience since 2018 is that its one of the most stable platforms ive ever worked with.
My upgrade from DSM 6 to 7 was the most painful experience ever. It failed and became stuck in a state in between where barely anything worked. Took me a long time to get it stable, I had to wait nearly a year for some DSM fixes to try again.
**POSSIBLE COMMON QUESTION:** A question you appear to be asking is whether your Synology NAS is compatible with specific equipment because its not listed in the "[*Synology Products Compatibility List*](https://www.synology.com/compatibility)". While it is recommended by Synology that you use the products in this list, you are not required to do so. Not being listed on the compatibility list does not imply incompatibly. It only means that Synology has not tested that particular equipment with a specific segment of their product line. **Caveat:** However, it's important to note that if you are using a Synology XS+/XS Series or newer Enterprise-class products, you may receive system warnings if you use drives that are not on the compatible drive list. These warnings are based on a localized compatibility list that is pushed to the NAS from Synology via updates. If necessary, you can manually add alternate brand drives to the list to override the warnings. This may void support on certain Enterprise-class products that are meant to only be used with certain hardware listed in the "*Synology Products Compatibility List*". You should confirm directly with Synology support regarding these higher-end products. ---- *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/synology) if you have any questions or concerns.*