Don’t Confuse Sync With Backup: A Synology Survival Guide
What Synology Backup Methods Are and What They Protect
A lot of administrators think that every copy of data is a backup. In reality, backup, synchronization, and replication all have very different goals. One of the most common reasons businesses lose recoverable data is because they don’t know the difference between Cloud Sync, Active Backup, and Hyper Backup.
Different tools protect different parts of the environment. If you choose the wrong one, files may be somewhere but still not be recoverable after deletion, ransomware, or a configuration failure.
Cloud Sync: File Mirroring, Not a Real Backup
Cloud Sync links your NAS to public cloud storage and makes sure that the files are the same in both places. When a user deletes a file on their computer, it is also deleted in the cloud.
This kind of behavior makes Cloud Sync great for sharing files and working together, but not so great for keeping your files safe. It doesn’t keep history unless the cloud provider lets you save different versions. Even then, recovery depends on how long things are kept outside.
Cloud Sync keeps things available, not recoverable. It makes sure that files are in more than one place, but it can’t always restore a file to its previous state after it has been corrupted.
When teams need to work together from different places, use Cloud Sync. Don’t use it for disaster recovery.
Hyper Backup: Full Recovery of the System
The purpose of Hyper Backup is to restore. It makes backups of shared folders, system settings, users, and installed apps that are different from each other.
When you delete a file, it doesn’t get rid of it from previous backup versions like synchronization does. Administrators can go back to a certain date and restore whole environments or just certain files.
Hyper Backup can also encrypt and compress files. This makes it good for storing offsite in another NAS, a cloud provider, or an external drive.
Most importantly, it keeps the environment in which it works. A new NAS can rebuild the whole system, including permissions and settings, after a hardware failure.
Hyper Backup keeps things safe so they can be recovered.
Active Backup: Protecting Devices and SaaS
Active Backup is more about external workloads than the NAS itself. It keeps computers, servers, virtual machines, and cloud services like Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 safe.
It doesn’t copy files; instead, it captures structured workload data. You can restore emails, OneDrive accounts, SharePoint libraries, and whole computers to earlier points in time.
This solution supports bare metal recovery, which means that you can rebuild a computer or server that has failed directly from backup images.
Active Backup keeps endpoints and business platforms safe.
Making Sure You Really Have a Full Backup
After an event, organizations often find holes. A share may have a backup, but not the permissions. Files might be there, but apps aren’t.
A full protection plan must have:
• Versions of files and folders that are shared
• Users and system settings
• Applications and packages that are already installed
• SaaS accounts and endpoints
• Copies kept off-site to keep them safe from ransomware
You can’t cover all layers with just one tool. To back up, you need to put them together the right way.
Example of a Synology Protection Strategy
A dependable setup usually uses a layered method:
- Cloud Sync lets people work together and access files from different places.
- Active Backup for data on workstations, servers, and SaaS
- Hyper Backup for setting up NAS and storing different versions
This combination makes sure that operations can keep going and that disasters can be recovered. A clean system state is still available, even if ransomware encrypts files.
About Epis Technology
Instead of using the default settings, Epis Technology creates backup plans that match business risk to the right Synology tool. They use multi-layer retention policies to keep things separate from recovery protection and synchronization.
Their deployments include backups of workstations, servers, and SaaS in a central monitoring system while keeping them separate from each other. Instead of untested backups, organizations get tested recovery procedures.