Synology Active Backup Suite Pros and Cons

If you had an DS(*) or RS(*) it is totaly free. That was the Point to Check this peace of Software. And it turns out it can do all the Task that Veeam can do. After some test with Windows (Server and Desktop) we figure out that it is a Smart and cost effective tool that does everything we need.

Backup and Restore as a Admin and as User. The Portal is a nice feature for some of our Users. They can Restore accidently deletet Data from their machines alone

We use it to backup 4 VMs 20 notebooks and 2 physical servers

(*)No J or PLAY Version Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

If you plan to back up many systems, you should scale the DS / RS generously and only use it for Active Backup Suite. This is not a disadvantage but rather a tip Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like that it just works — when it works. But I have had more issues with it than I can imagine, and I only use it to backup a handful of devices across two NAS servers. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Where do I start?

1. If you have a computer crash and you need to restore a full machine backup, you have to restore to an IDENTICAL computer, you cannot restore to a similar computer. That caused us to spend a week's worth of hours trying to recover a computer and a month's worth of calendar time.

2. The Active Backup is constantly failing to backup a Windows computer not being able to contact, because of VSS issues, or some other issues. We've followed all the docs on how to fix it and have had an ongoing tech support thread where they keep asking us to verify the same things and still it does not work. If we have not spend 80 hours of what would otherwise be billable time trying to resolve this then we haven't spend a minute on it. And with no end in sight.

3. They added a new software feature to protect against randsomeware attacts but one of my two NAS — the older one — they decided not to support, and through no hardware reason I can discerne other than as an incentive to buy a newer model.

4. On one of my devices it constantly stops backing up when the Let's Encrypt certificate times out. That means we can go days without backup before we realize.

5. What's worse, if Synology releases a new Active Backup agent it will stop backing up until we update it. We've gone a month without a backup because we did not realize this.

Simply put, if I had not already invested in Synology I would be looking for something else that is more reliable to backup and more reliable for restore. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The active backup suite is great and does work extremely well, we were looking at this as an option when comparing vendors, while one of the reasons we didn't use it was due to our cloud based nature, the support was extreemly helpfuil for the intial testing, we also found the product to be easy to use and implment. as we do daily checks we go in the platform frequently to check backups are successful but also notify into our platforms via the email success, failure feature. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is easy to intergrate however as we primarily cloud based it was not the most suitable against some cloud only providers due to our serverless configuration. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We are a IT Managed Service Provider, at every singel one of our clients that we have installed a Synology NAS, we have sset up Active Backup Suite to ensure their M365 estate is backed up, their critical servers, VM's & endpoints are also backed up. On many occasions this has saved us hours, sometimes days of extra work in rebuilding failed systems. I cannot recommned it enough.

It's easy to use, The support is fantastic if its needed, We find it simple to set up, and we use it across the board. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Perhaps even more granular notification settings would be more useful Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Over many years working in IT, I had an almost traumatic relationship with backup systems. They were very burdensome, expensive, and when it came time to actually recover data, it was a toss-up. I was never sure that I would actually be able to retrieve all the information.

Active backup was the first system that made sense. It backs up all my devices, no matter how heterogenous they are. It does a superb job of incremental backups, so that I can backup very quickly and without excessive storage. The user interface is easy and intuitive. The fact that it integrates all my information needs is paramount. Until I got Synology, backing up was so tiresome that I honestly hardly ever did it. Now, I can perform daily backups without any extra burden and I simply forget about it until I actually need to recover information. The first set-up of each backup was also easy to implement, and the customer support is beyond any other customer support I ever encountered. It is quick, i speak with real engineers, that actually know what they are talking about, and they are an immense help. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I wish that Microsoft backups would allow me to backup a single Microsoft 365 account in a system where I am just a normal user and not an admin.

It works great on allowing an admin to back the whole company up, but it would be helpful if it allowed a single user to backup their own personal data. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Two years ago I found this software already installed on my Synology DS 220+ and DS720+ and used it to do a differential backup of the primary NAS with 60-day retention. I scheduled the secondary NAS to turn on and off only for the time needed to save data from the primary. This way I have a second copy of the backups on a NAS that is turned on for less than an hour a day.

I run restore tests regularly and it has never failed. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Must lie telling that It's just in english :) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I usually use Synology Active Backup Suite to help my customers to daily protect their data. The implementation is really simple and it doesn't require a lot of technical skills. You have to choose only the source (or multiple sources) and the destination of the backup. It can protect a range of sources, from a simple PC to the most complex server.

Synology Active Backup Suite requires a small agent to be installed on each device you want to protect. This agent is not needed if you want to back up your NAS to Synology C2.

All configuration is done through a convenient console from which you can configure the backup frequency of each device, the automatic update of the agents and possibly restore the device.

Customer Service is always available to help you solve any problem you may have, but you can rest assured that you will not have any problems.

The best choice is to also implement a C2 backup from your NAS to Synology cloud service so that you can backup your data offline, thus absolutely avoiding data loss. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I find no downsides to using Synology Active Backup Suite Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I work for not-for-profits, arts organizations, and small businesses. Synology Active Backup provides a low cost, robust solution. Enabling user recovery saves my impoverished clients money. It has been solid and not too burdensome in bandwidth. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Setup is easy but some users have really gone wrong with it when they attempted to do it on their own. Not too bad to fix, but a bit challenging for the "How hard could that be?" crowd. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Nothing. I bought a box (DS416+Play) that was supposed to help me work, and keep me safe. It turned out to be a "$99 USB disk drive". While it has 12Tib of disks, but <6T usable space it offers no real 'features' worth a damn. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

When I was new to linux I accidentally dumped a directory. > 100k files lost! I had to buy other s'ware to recover, still not out of the woods, as all 'filenames' were irretreivably separated from the files contents. The backup was *WORTHLESS*. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Synology Active backup, is an easy to use solution for protection of your Office 365 email. The product is easy to install and manage as well as been able to restore emails quickly. We use this continusouly to have backups ever minute of the day. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The product is so easy to use, and setup, but you need some common sense to understand the recover process but its not hard. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.