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The Synology End Game

(lowendbox.com)
452 points amacbride | 11 comments | 29 Aug 25 06:37 UTC | HN request time: 1.34s | source | bottom
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exmadscientist ◴[29 Aug 25 09:49 UTC] No.45062103[source]▶
A big part of the appeal of Synology was that you could just forget about it. I have a little one in the corner that's just been sitting there serving files out over SMB for years now. It doesn't need to do anything more and I don't need to think about it.

A lot of the alternatives being proposed are not so easy to maintain. A full general purpose OS install doesn't really take care of itself. And I don't have (and don't want) a 19-inch rack at home. Ever.

So what's the set-up-and-forget-until-it-gets-kicked-over option?

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1. pjmlp ◴[29 Aug 25 11:12 UTC] No.45062590[source]▶
There isn't many, as stupid as it may sound, I keep burning CD/DVD/BluRay and piling up external drives.

Yes, it is a pain versus having a NAS, but at least I don't have to deal with this kind of stuff.

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2. TheCondor ◴[29 Aug 25 13:43 UTC] No.45064050[source]▶
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

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3. postexitus ◴[29 Aug 25 13:47 UTC] No.45064085[source]▶
Are you sure they survive for the time period you intend them to? When I was a teenager, I though the DVDs and BluRays I burned would be forever - 15 years later I am very unhappy to find that some of them started to crack and flay - it's a pain to keep checking them. Nothing like the guarantees a NAS + Cloud backup could provide.
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4. pjmlp ◴[29 Aug 25 13:50 UTC] No.45064126[source]▶
NAS also fail, and cloud backups can be taken away without notice.

Hence why multiple copies.

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5. pjmlp ◴[29 Aug 25 13:52 UTC] No.45064154[source]▶
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.

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6. postexitus ◴[29 Aug 25 15:25 UTC] No.45065360{3}[source]▶
sure, but NAS and cloud doesn't fail at the same time. Also NAS provide some redundancy in-house as well. Whereas BluRay is a single copy - even if you burn multiple copies, they degrade at the same rate.
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7. pjmlp ◴[29 Aug 25 17:00 UTC] No.45066610{4}[source]▶
That would be true if I would have done all copies on the same day, and never duplicated disks.
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8. procaryote ◴[29 Aug 25 17:54 UTC] No.45067313{3}[source]▶
rgrep is easier on a nas though
9. vunderba ◴[29 Aug 25 21:29 UTC] No.45069618{3}[source]▶
Sure, but clicking through a folder set on a single managed volume is orders of magnitude easier than rooting through a hundred blue ray DVDs, popping each one into your optical reader in the hopes that it is the correct one, and then having to search within that volume.
10. kalleboo ◴[30 Aug 25 00:13 UTC] No.45070806{3}[source]▶
> Search isn't helpful if the stuff wasn't properly indexed

Synology indexes file contents similar to Spotlight on the Mac.

11. postexitus ◴[01 Sep 25 09:51 UTC] No.45091201{5}[source]▶
You basically imply that you have a NAS that you regularly take backups to BluRay?