Synology External Drive Backup Tasks

We currently have a QNAP NAS that in order to follow a 3-2-1 backup strategy we use (2) external 2.5" HDD to copy our daily VM backups. I am looking into alternate options to Veeam for our ESXi backups and see that Synology offers Active Backup.

I know QNAP has their Hyper Data Backup and I have tested that and it works great except for one feature that it is missing compared to Veeam and Synology Active Bakcup and that is file level restore. At times I just want to restore a single file and not restore the entire VM.

Now to my question about Synology external backups tasks. On the QNAP I simply plug in the HDD’s and the backup process begins and sends me an e-mail confirming the tasks have started. Does Synology have an automated external drive backup process that operates like that? Simply plug it in and the backup starts?

I have never used it because we use cloud backups, but they have a write up here

Thanks, Tom. I did see that write up and they have schedules for the backups but things come up and I rarely have the backups drives swapped out at the same time every day and that’s why I like the QNAP auto-run feature for the backup tasks. As soon as it identifies the external USB it runs the task(s) associated with that drive.

It may also be time to offload some of this to Backblaze as well! :smile: