Backup files to Sia using Synology NAS & StoreWise StoreWise Follow Jun 19, 2019 · Unlisted

Yes!! The ability to backup your Synology NAS to Sia is here. This was one of our most requested features to date.

We’ve been working hard implementing virtual-hosted–style requests and certificate management over the last week in order to support backup apps like Hyper Backup on the Synology NAS.

1. Introduction

Many of us these days have a Synology NAS (or another NAS device) at home or work to easily store and access our data without having to run around with USB-disks all the time. These small devices, although very robust, have their hardware limitations and sometimes they do fail due to internal or external factors, permanently. In the case they do fail, we want to be able to easily retrieve and restore our backups later on another Synology.

In this guide we will configure Hyper Backup (Beta)on Synology with StoreWise S3 (AWS S3 compatible REST API) to backup our files to the Sia decentralized cloud. To get started we need a StoreWise account if we don’t already have one. To do this please read our last medium post here or sign-up directly here. StoreWise offers a free 14 day trial with 5 GB of storage.

“Ensuring data safety on your Synology NAS requires a reliable backup plan. With Hyper Backup, retrieving data from multiple recovery points with minimized storage consumption is never a big challenge.” - Hyper backup

Hyper backup uses technologies like Data deduplication, Data encryption (AES-256)and compression to optimize storage, outbound traffic efficiency and security. This ensures that our data is always secure will never use more resources than necessary.

2. Hyper backup configuration

Note!! Synology Hyper Backup Beta is required for this tutorial to work, it will not work on the standard Hyper Backup release. After the Beta version is installed the Synology NAS has to be restarted.

First if we don’t already have Hyper backup Beta we should go into our Package center on Synology and download it. Note that the standard version of Hyper Backup will not work. If the standard version of Hyper Backup is already installed we should install Hyper Backup Beta and restart our Synology NAS. After installation we should be prompted with the following screen;

Hyper Backup landing page

We then scroll down and select ‘S3 Storage’. Next we have to enter our StoreWise SiaS3 credentials as described in proceeding figure. ‘Access Key’ and ‘Secret Key’ can be generated under the ‘Credentials’ menu of our StoreWise account. Subsequently under ‘Bucket name’ we can either create a new bucket within Hyper Backup or use a pre-existing bucket. The bucket name should be a simple as possible and cannot contain any dots. In ‘Directory’ we enter the name of the directory we would like to backup our NAS data too. Note that this has to be a new folder name and can’t already exist in the bucket.

Adding our StoreWise S3 details to Hyper Backup

In the next screen we can select which data we want to backup.

Select which data we want to backup

Followed by any application data that we might want to backup offsite.

Application data that we want to backup

3. Backup Settings

In the Hyper backup settings tab we should tick the ‘Compress backup data’ box and set the ‘Multipart Upload part Size (MB)’ to 512 as it will more effectively use our storage and bandwidth resources. Next we should select the ‘Enable client-side encryption’ and enter a strong password since data over AWS S3 isn’t encrypted in transit by default except for the in-rest native AES-256 cloud encryption/sharding that Sia offers.

Backup settings

Proceeding to the rotation screen we can select our backup policy. We suggest to select ‘Smart Recycle’ to save on our cloud storage usage.

Backup schedule

Finally we hit on ‘Apply’ and we are all done, we are now backing-up our Synology NAS data to the Sia cloud!!

4. Troubleshooting

Since multipart uploading isn’t working on StoreWise SiaS3 yet, some issues might occur towards the end of the backup that cause it to fail. If backups are consecutively failing please do the following:

Remove user backup profiles and attached buckets on SiaS3. Install Hyper Backup Beta again. Restart Synology. Setup backup configuration again with multipart size at 512 MB.

That should solve the problem. If issues still persist please respond to this blog post, join our discord community here or contact us directly via meije@storewise.tech

5. Conclusion

Hyper Backups is an awesome tool to backup our Synology data so that in case something does happen with our little storage box we are still able to retrieve and restore our precious data. It is awesome knowing that our Synology data goes straight to the Sia network so all our backups are sharded, encrypted and resiliently distributed across hundreds of storage nodes across the globe.

We hope you enjoyed this little blog post, till next time!

The StoreWise team

meije@storewise.tech

Discord