Top Synology Feature - Backup Any Windows PC to a Synology NAS with Active Backup for Business

all right how's it going y'all today we're going to be going over honestly one of synology's best features that i've really not been able to test or do tutorials on because i didn't have a windows license well i finally broke down and boot camp to my computer and so now i'm finally able to start doing tutorials using synology's active backup for business and it is by far one of synology's best features so do not let the name worry you that oh this is just a business application synology active backup for business allows you to back up in incredible detail any windows computer basically being able to restore it and all the files from any time period even being able to do what's called a bare metal restore i know that sounds like a lot and very complicated but it's really incredibly easy essentially what that allows you to do is throw your hard drive out the window of your computer get a new hard drive and then just using synology's tool and a usb drive you basically just create this install flash drive then once you've hooked up your new hard drive into your computer you plug in the flash drive and synology will automatically reset up your computer just like it was whenever that last active backup of your business snapshot was taken so that means every single one of your files is the same way every single one of your settings it is what's called bare metal the computer hardly knows that there was a different hard drive in there it is incredibly powerful it does that as well as being able to allow you to go through the portal and access all the versions of your files that it has without having to go through this clunky system you can just see all versions of all of your files it is one of their best features and it is completely free and so honestly if you have a windows pc that you need to be backing up it is so much better i actually like it better than max time machine because it's so quick compared to using time machine to back something up i actually am hoping that one day they have a mac client for this because i honestly would use it over time machine it is that good and so in this video we're going to go over how to backup any windows pc to a synology nas automatically and it will just run in the background and anytime it can connect it'll be backing up your files and snapshots of your files and so it's really easy to go ahead and get started the first thing you're going to want to do is go ahead and log into dsm and as you can see right here i'm currently on the dsm-7 beta but active backup for business is essentially identical between the two versions so i'm just making these all in dsm 7 for future life and so the first thing we're going to go ahead and do is go into package center and we're just going to go ahead and click active backup for business if you're not in the beta or if this is the live version it won't say join beta it'll just say download but click on it and it's just going to go ahead and install it is going to make you do one thing and you're actually going to have to sign into synology you're not going to have to pay for this at all but they do make you sign in i think it's because they want to make sure that people who are using x apologies basically open source version of synology since synology is based off of linux they're required to give the source code out they don't want those people being able to use this tool i think i'm not sure why else i've not seen anything else that is free that makes you do this from synology but that's just my best guess so once it's downloaded you just go ahead and click open and it's going to say hey you have to activate it and apparently there is a process for an air gap synology to activate it but i have a network connection and so i'm just gonna go ahead and click activate and you're just gonna have to go ahead and agree and sign in and so once you've done that we get to here one thing i didn't forget to mention earlier is unfortunately active backup for business does require you to have a volume using btrfs so that is a limitation you're not going to be able to use this on the j models or anything that does not have btrfs enabled that's why i really would recommend if you're building a volume just select btrfs if you can because it unlocks so many great features that comes with synology and is just so powerful so unfortunately if you have an ext4 or three volume you're just not going to be able to use active backup for business and so the user interface is incredibly easy and i've already touched on this for the file server backup but the real power is under pc so pcs are super easy to use we're just going to be able to click add device and it's going to tell us how to do this essentially you just install the software on every single windows pc you like backed up and it's got the target for it right here just click on it 32 or 64 bit if your process is 64 bit i would choose 64-bit alright and so once it's gone ahead and downloaded just go ahead and click on it and basically run through the installer and it installs really quick and just go ahead and launch it once it's done all right and so now we can see right here the icons up so we just click on it and now it's just incredibly easy to set up you just do the server address and then the login credentials and so i do believe you have to log into this with admin credentials and so for server address type in the server address for me it's testbed.spacex and i believe this also should support basically whatever this server name is using the local domain and then just sign in most of you will not be running a proxy and if you're running proxy i assume you already know what you're doing with this stuff and so this is one thing you might get an error like this if you've not set up a properly signed ssl certificate basically it says hey this is not the right ssl certificate it is not officially signed but since i know this is my ssl certificate and this is just locally that is okay you actually still get full ssl encryption because you are using a signed ssl certificate it's just not the correct signature and so your device says hey are you sure you want to trust this but once you trust it it still uses it just like anything else and so we're just going to go ahead and click proceed anyway and so now it's basically set us up for it and so we're just going to click ok and so as we can see in dsm right here we've got hey there's a new device connected and so we can go ahead and basically set up whatever we would like with this we can now see it and we've got a ton of options here we can go through and create a new task for it with edit you can say backup specific drives you can say volumes you can choose whatever you like here and it's really great you can choose the schedule so i would really recommend having this honestly be a daily backup because it is so nice to have and you can even have this running the background and have it run within special things it's a really cool setup and finally the most important thing is probably retention retention basically says how long to keep data once it's been deleted off your computer before deleting it off the backup so if you retain everything for a year essentially any files you delete on your computer will stay on the nas for an entire year and so that's just where you've got a plan for how much storage you'd like you can always go a little bit less aggressive so maybe a year to start with and then if you notice it being very large you can essentially decrease this and then it'll just delete the old versions and so i would start with a longer policy and then go to a shorter one if you start running out of space or just don't need it and then under advanced retention policies where you really set that of hey when do you want to keep everything so i'm just going to have a snapshot every month for the last year and so what this means is i'm going to keep my last 10 versions that's this then i'm going to go through the list and essentially for every earliest one that meets something i'm going to keep it then if i go down this list and everything's already been met i'm going to delete a snapshot that does not me any of these extra ones and so i'm going to make sure to have a version for every day for seven days and so if i had two snapshots in a day essentially the one that was taken later in the day would be the one that gets deleted and same thing for the weeks and everything like that it's pretty straightforward and so i'm going to choose that though depending on your needs you can really set this up to whatever you need and honestly that's all there is to it i would really recommend having compression because it can really help you out and now we're just going to go ahead and click ok and now we're going to say backup now and wow we are flying through here we are really using this tango card remember well you probably don't know i've only got three eight terabyte drives and a raid zero array here so having 200 megabytes per second is pretty good especially if you start accounting random writes that can actually really slow down a hard drive but we're doing pretty well well we've slowed down a little bit but yeah it flies through it i'm very impressed by it all right and so that backup went up pretty quick and so now we can kind of see what's going on with it but first i want to add one change to a file just to make it a lot easier to see what's going on with it so backups use snapshots which are awesome it allows you to save a ton of space while also having a lot of versions of files btrfs snapshots are a really cool thing and synology's really been leveraging them with their applications and so we're just going to go ahead and minimize this and so now i'm going to go ahead and just create a new file for us and we'll just say this is a test simple enough right so now i have this file on there so now let's go back in and we're going to go ahead and do one more backup really quick and this one should go fairly quickly because we're just going to go ahead and it'll just see oh wait there's just one very small change though it still does kind of have to check everything and so now we've done that right we've got that back up now we're gonna go ahead and make a modification to that file so i'm gonna go ahead and open it again so i just made a modification to the file and i'm going to save it now we're going to go ahead and back it up again and this way we'll see exactly what active backup for business allows you to do all right so now that second backup is done we can really see the power of this so now i'm just going to go ahead and close active backup for business and i'm going to open my applications folder and you're going to see right here that it's installed this active backup for business portal and so the portal is how you restore things and see different options and so if you look down here we have a timeline and right here is your volume that you backed up and so disk zero is going to be your c drive most likely and so you can see right here there's a bunch of different stuff here and this is your c drive so let's just go into users we'll we'll go into my desktop and we can see that there's this test file and so there are multiple options here so if we go into the very initial version we're going to see that test file does not exist then if we go to the second version and we click on it we've got two different options we can either restore it and it will just basically put the new file in there for us and so let's do that and so what this is going to do is it's just going to overwrite that file before you do this i would actually recommend doing another backup which we've already done just to make sure that if you accidentally overwrite something you didn't plan on overwriting you'll have that file but we can now just go ahead and click ok and now if we go in we should open up test and we'll see that this is the first modification of the file before i put that second line in there and that's the power of this is we were able to incredibly easily go back to an older version of a file if we didn't want to restore it we also could have just downloaded the thing and then had two versions of it and merge whatever changes we wanted to in it is incredibly powerful and this is just the file side as i said earlier you can do the exact same thing but from a hard drive level meaning you can throw your hard drive out stick that usb drive in and create your hard drive exactly how it was at any point in time where you had a snapshot it is incredibly powerful and beats out most backup solutions that i know for windows and so this tool is incredibly powerful you can just go through and browse all these different files and it also does deduplication meaning if you backup a lot of windows computers you'll actually be saving space because most likely they've got very similar program files and installation files which active backup for business will just compress we can look through it here under active backup for business regular and if we scroll down we'll see the file size of everything and we'll see the compression and deduplication that we've got it is really amazing and so even though i've just backed up one computer it's already saved nine gigs due to deduplication and so you can back up a ton of different windows pcs to this and really save a ton of data because it's most likely they're going to have very similar files on there you can also go through and backup virtual machines and so many other stuff dsm 7 also has a beta that allows you to up linux machines which i'm really excited to try out and so really that's all there is to it your synology is now just in the background going to be constantly backing up your windows pc and it is going to work so well you're going to forget about it until you need it and it is very self-sufficient i would also recommend turning on notifications for your email that way if something does happen you will get an email about it and so you don't have backups breaking and you never finding out remember backups are only good if you can restore from them and so it's always a good idea to go through every few months and just do a manual restore just say hey do i have all the files on there just to make sure especially for those mission critical data all right well that's going to be it for this tutorial as you see here active backup for business is incredibly powerful and there's so many things you can do with it go and leave any other tutorials you'd like to make in the comments below and have a good one bye [Music] you

Channel: SpaceRex

Views: 19,757

Keywords:

Id: CSVuOkHtLbE

Length: 14min 14sec (854 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 28 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Pause-Professional]

Thanks for the detailed video. This seams so much better than the clonezilla backups I was doing. I also hope they can get a MacOS client.

[u/Playing_Pazaak]

I like your utube channel, keep up the great content.

[u/chaplin2]

Does Active Back up for Business support encryption in transit and at rest?

If not, it’s missing an important feature.

Also, how about Linux backup?

[u/reddi-tom]

The primary reason I bought my DS920+ ; Active Backup for Business. I can now backup my HomeLab, both virtual (ESX and Hyper-V supported, weirdly VMM isn’t) and physical servers and my laptops plus PC are also nicely backupped. Dedup works awesome as well!

[u/BatsRule-info]

Thanks. Your YouTube channel is great.

[u/gwynethsdad]

I love ABB! I've used it at multiple client sites, plus have used it to migrate from old PCs to new. It's a very robust, multifaceted tool!

[u/MrNerd82]

I might give this a look when I have some time -- I'm sure it's old school by today's standards but I just have Acronis do automated backups for me to the NAS, verifies each run, encrypted, and never had a single loss or issue over the years.

[u/Discosaurus]

Also a great method when re-installing an OS! Being able to select backups to restore by folder means you bypass 95% of the pain-points.

[u/mightyt2000]

Yet another great SpaceRex vid! Thanks again!! 😎👍🏻