I was planning to buy a VCR for my uncle since he has a lot of old DVDs lying around that he wants to watch. But VCRs are quite outdated now, so I was thinking of ripping them to a Synology NAS and then using DS Video to stream them across devices like his TV and phone.
What do you think? Should I still go for a Synology NAS? I’d only need about two 8TB HDDs at most.
I’m looking for something stable and easy to use right out of the box. Another thing is, even if he travels, he’d still be able to watch the content remotely, and I won’t have to do much for remote access.
Synology Active Backup is the main reason I keep it in my home “production” setup. I’ve built and run two TrueNAS systems that I originally planned to deploy for business use, but honestly, I haven’t found a clean or reliable way to replicate something like Google/Microsoft Active Backup on TrueNAS, so I’ve avoided trying to force it.
Tom, what do you think would be the simplest way to pull this off?
My old (and honestly kinda janky) workaround was to spin up a Windows VM that synced Google (desktop app) and OneDrive (and Outlook emails) using Files On-Demand, then took regular snapshots and pushed backups to a separate dataset. It technically worked for a couple of months, but it always felt duct-taped together. Once I found out about Synology’s Active Backup, I migrated everything over.
Now I have a dedicated 2-bay Synology box just for business backups, and it’s what I recommend to clients too, especially when they need that reliable, hands-off backup experience. It’s hard to move away in that aspect, maybe because I haven’t found a good solution yet.
What do you recommend? Should I go with Synology or consider other options?
My other concern is remote access—I’d prefer a solution that doesn’t require opening ports or complex configuration.
It’s funny that Synology can’t make enough profit from the drives selling them at regular retail prices. Ever price drives from Supermicro? They sell a lot of drives and the prices are very competitive, the last couple of rounds of replacements have come through them because it was generally cheaper. I would think that Synology has similar buying power and could pass a little of that off to the customers, at least sell the vendor locked firmware at retail and take the profit from the volume discounts.
I’ve had vendor locked drives in some appliances before, it sucks. Generally these appliances allowed you to use the generic drives, but they would be at reduced speed.
But, this will also spur hackers to figure it out… How long until someone figures out which ID is needed on the drives to make a generic drive work? Usually not too long.
In the end, you have to ask yourself this: “How often do I need to replace/upgrade my drives?” I’m guessing the answer is not very frequently so this lock in is probably not a big deal to 75% of the buyers. That other 25% will be made of 5-10% that swear and find another solution, and the rest by those that just grumble a lot and go on using the product.
I am surprised that there isn’t another windows backup tool that people can use, I haven’t really looked into it but guessing since no one mentions a solution, there isn’t a good cheap offering.
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