Sunday, June 4, 2017

Backups, Synology, and the Recycle Bin

I am a big fan of Synology products, owning their 5-bay DS1515+ NAS series (now 1517+) and the RT2600 router. The Synology software is fantastic, user-friendly, and allows additional packages to be installed, further extending the features of the product. Within the last year or so, they've greatly improved their cloud-syncing features, and the CloudSync package provides an easy way to sync files to/from Synology to cloud providers. They also have packages for syncing to other storage options (such as Amazon's Glacier storage).

I had recently configured my NAS drive to backup all local files to Amazon Drive, which offers unlimited storage for $59.99 a year (plus tax). Yes, unlimited! It's a great deal. If you don't have a cloud backup location for your files, Amazon's offering is worth looking into. And they have software that you can install across different platforms so you can sync local files and directories to the cloud.

I was cleaning up the folder structure today in the Synology File Station software and accidentally deleted a root folder (yikes!). I immediately caught the error, paused the sync, but it was too late; some of the files were deleted, both on Synology and on Amazon. Fortunately, Amazon Drive has a "Recycle Bin" so I was able to recover the files. However, this made me enable a feature I had assumed was turned on in Synology: Synology's Recycle Bin. You need to verify yours is turned on too.

Navigate to the Synology Control Panel, choose the Shared Folders icon, select the appropriate folder, choose Edit, and check the "Enable Recycle Bin" option. Now if you do something terrible like deleting an important folder, at least you won't have to wait for hours to pull it back down, if you are syncing to another location.

Two lessons learned:
1. Make sure you have more than one backup. Seriously, buy some space on Amazon or another cloud provider, set up a sync, and make sure it completes. It's important!
2. Make sure your folders have an "undelete" option available.

And just for grins, the files on my Synology that are longer term, unchanging backups, are going to have a third backup location on Amazon's Glacier storage, so that I am covered there. At $0.01/month/GB, it's a cheap option.