Thinking about expanding / altering a Synology configuration

[brandonkick]

Right now I have a setup at my part time job where a Synology DS415+ (4x2TB WD REDs in Raid 10) is used as a "backup machine".

Their are roughly 15-20 devices set up to backup the users documents and desktop folders to the synology as well as a few dedicated share directories for things like "accounting dept" and "drafting department".

The DS415+ sits on the network, and nightly I have SyncBackFree do backups from each workstation to the Synology. The Synology also has a pair of identical external USB hard drives that it backs up to every day. Each day the USB drive gets swapped out, taken home, and the other one gets plugged in to the Synology.


I don't like this really. There are a few reasons.

1) The DS415+ and it's disks are a little more than 3 years old at this point.

2) With a single DS415+, if anything were to happen, there would likely be pretty significant downtime. Unless it were as simple as the power supply needing replaced (pending we had one on hand)... but if there were something that required a restore/reconfig.... it potentially could be hours and hours best case if not a day or two until it were fully back up.

3) The External USB drive will not get swapped out from time to time. So the one that is taken home with the office manager could potentially be a few days out of date. I don't know that it happens often, but it's just another variable I'd rather not have.

4) Sometimes SyncBack screws up. Various issues, two biggest being some times the scheduled task images gets corrupted and the backups stop running on that machine. Also, sometimes it randomly stops backing up certain files for whatever reason.


Just today I got to thinking I'd be better off doing some type of folder redirection instead of this backup setup. So I got to playing around, researching, and trying things and found that I could simply right click a folder, go down to properties, go to the location tab, and then browse to a synology directory that a user has access to. So I tested it out on a workstation, and got both the desktop and documents folder redirected to that users synology directory. Works pretty well... had a tiny bit of a strange issue where not all shortcuts were copying to the redirected location but I found if I made copies of those on the local desktop they appeared in the redirect location.. then I just deleted the "original" shortcuts. Problem solved and now both of these directories are living on the Synology. No need to worry about SyncBack failing or having some weird problem.

This creates one new issue though, now the Synology is a single point of failure. If it goes down, all users go down (or atleast their redirected folders do). That is, as far as I know anyway. If that were to happen in my scenario, would their folders revert back to the default locations? Will they be "missing" data if they do that (basically would the default locations only contain what they had when the redirect was set up?) This bothers me.

To solve that issue, I'm thinking about getting a second Synology NAS to configure as a "backup / failover" but I'm not sure how easy that is to do. My goal is to have two Synology units in SHA mode, so if one fails the other takes over as active in about a min or so. I'm just wondering how nicely the folder redirection would play with that... since the failover device is different than the one that redirection was set up for. I tend to think that in "failover" the redirection that is configured on the workstations may not work... since Synology1 was the original mapping and Synology2 is now active. Or does the SHA mode make the synology units true clones of each other?

In order to do this, would I need another 415+ or could I go with something newer so long as it was at least 4 bays and had the same disk configuration (capacity / arrangements / geometry)?

Is their a better way to do folder redirection than the way I'm describing?


What have you all experienced as the best way to prepare for and recover from a Synology "disaster"? Can you do a backup in a sense that not only are you backing up all the data, but also the units configuration?

 

[brandonkick]

No one?

 

[HCHTech]

You can put a second synology offsite somewhere and have them sync over a VPN connection with Hyperbackup. Will the current unit run DSM6?

This doesn't backup the units configuration, but there is a tool for that to export a configuration file somewhere. Just put that file somewhere on the data volume and then it will be synced offsite at the same time as everything else.

I just did this at a small accountant client of mine last year. Cost them another Sonicwall at the owner's home for the VPN tunnel and a 2nd Synology. There were doing the USB disk shuffle as well before that. Make sure you setup the monitoring so you can keep an eye on it - otherwise the out-of-sight-out-of-mind thing will get you.

 

[brandonkick]

Yes it is running DSM6 currently.

Having a second synology offsite would help with "disaster proofing" for sure. I think in terms of that, I'm really going to fight to get the head honcho to agree to use something like Amazon S3 or Glacier.

However, I really would like the idea of something more along the lines of failover. I am only at this job part time now, and do not go every day. Not only that, but I have quite a few other responsibilities there. Knowing that if Synology 1 goes down, Synology 2 will kick in and keep things going without the rest of the people there knowing it... that would be great.

In furthering my research, it really seems like another diskstation to run in SHA mode along side the current one is the way to go. The icing on the cake would be if my method of creating folder redirection would still work just fine even when the setup failed over.

 

[fencepost]

With Windows systems, this is what you have a domain and DFS for - replication between two servers, and everything connecting via \\domain\data\sharename (naming is variable). That also lets you set things like the folder redirection and security via Group Policy.

Not sure how much of that you can do with Synology, but I need to find out. I think our customer base is going to be shifting a lot to smaller clients with more cloud hosted LOB, and I'm not so sure it makes much sense to throw what I'd want as a minimal Windows server into a 4-5 person office.

 

[brandonkick]

As an update, I've been left to figure a lot of this out for myself.

I have a second syology unit (DS916+) and set it up in the same configuration. 4x2TB drives on both machines in RAID 10.

I have the second unit ready to go (forgot how long RAID scrubbing takes! something like 12 hours I think it was) and have the basics worked out on the setup. It wasn't inherently clear, but through research, a bit of light help from the synology forums and a youtube video in another language, I have things to the point where the high availability cluster are ready go.

I've been able to "redirect" the folders I want to do so with to the UNC shares on the synology for each users workstation. Getting the HA setup going is simply the last step, but I'm a tiny bit confused on the final part of the configuration.

It's asking me for an HA Cluster Name (whatever I want), and then configuring the cluster interface. I can only select LAN 2 (each machine only has two LAN ports, and the heartbeat connection is set up on LAN 1 between both devices) and I get to specify an IP. I'm not sure if it should be the static IP configured for LAN 2 on the active server, static IP configured for LAN 2 on passive service, or an arbitrary IP I set up specifically for accessing this new HA cluster.

I'm just not sure if now I access this cluster through this IP I choose in this step, or if I access the cluster in the same manner I used to access what is now the active server and if/when a failure happens things will just take care of themselves behind the scenes.


Last little bit I need to work out.