I think, I will just start an introduction thread here, where all of us (who would like) can introduce themselves respectively their (home) setup of their Synology equipment.
I live in Germany and started in 2016 with my first NAS a DS1815+ with 4 hard drives and 6 GB RAM.
The main purpose of my Synology is to store my collection of tv recordings which increases daily. It also serves as a backup unit for my Mac and my brothers computer (we share the same network).
Over the time, more and more hard drives were added and after a while, all slots were populated with hard drives.
At this time, the whole backup of my Synology was located on a bunch of USB drives which where placed around my Synology.
Last year I faced the decision to buy a 5 bay expansion or to buy a second NAS.
I decided to buy a second Synology, a DS1821+, and three more hard drives. I upgraded the DS1821+ to 32 GB RAM, not because I needed, just because I can I put all of the hard drives from the old NAS to the new one and the three new drives in the old NAS.
At this point my data was split up between the two NAS and the backup setup with the USB drives was still the same.
After a few month, I wasn’t comfortable with this whole situation, especially regarding the bunch of USB drives as my backup and because Hyper Backup can’t use several USB drives for one backup job.
At this point my collection of data was already so large, that it doesn’t fit on the largest available hard drive. So I came to the conclusion to buy new (and bigger) hard drives for my main NAS (DS1821+) to increase the space on this unit and copy the data from my old NAS to the new one (to have it on one large volume).
The replaced old (and still working) hard drives found a new place in the old NAS, where I use Hyper Backup Vault to store the whole backup from my main NAS and so I got rid off the USB drives.
And that is the situation till today. All is working great and I didn’t regret the decision to buy a new Synology or to buy Synology at all.
Feel free to ask questions and I am happy to be part of this community.
Best regards,
Oliver
PS: I edited this post to get rid off the unnecessary line breaks which where caused by copy and paste from an external editor.
I’ve been using Synology products over 10 years. I started out with 1 and 2 bay “J” models for backing up the assortment of desktop and laptop devices my wife and I owned. At one point my wife’s job required her to travel so I purchased a DS1813+ and embarked on a massive project I’d been wanting to try for years. I started digitizing family video going back to the early 1950’s as well as a truckload of DVD movies and CD music we owned. I acquired a lifetime Plex pass and used the Synology Plex package to host everything.
The old DS1813+ had 48Tb raw storage and served us well for 9-1/2 years…many DSM upgrades along the way. Two weeks ago I retired the DS1813+ (it’s for sale if anybody needs a reliable old NAS) and transitioned to a DS1522+ with three 16Tb drives. I’ve been using Ubiquiti access points for a couple of years so I also upgraded my router to the Dream Machine SE. I’ve drained my 2023 technology budget but Synology + Ubiquiti is a powerful combination!
I retired 7 years ago from a very rewarding IT career with a large telecommunications company. A little over two years ago I landed a part-time IT job with our small police department to keep busy. Only an old Windows 2012 server was being backed up. We’re now running a new Dell with Server 2022. All of our servers and desktops are now backed up using a DS1821+ and a DS1522+. Active Backup for Business has been a real lifesaver. Now all of the mission critical law enforcement data is well protected by a combination of AB4B, HyperBackup and Snapshot Replication. In a few weeks we’ll migrate from Cisco router and access points to Ubiquiti.
I’ve come a long way from starting my career as a mainframe COBOL programmer but there’s one universal IT truth… there’s ALWAYS something new to learn.
Those three packages are probably the most underrated features of a Synology NAS! Especially to a business. So many other NAS units just do not have an easy way to create a pretty bullet proof 3-2-1 backup solution that anyone can manage and maintain. Plus Active Backup for Business being license free is an unbelievable deal!
From what I have heard there is a huge demand right now for COBOL programmers, because so many massive enterprises are built on it, but no one gets taught it in school anymore
Thank you, for your positive feedback!
And yes, I came to the point, when I realized, that I needed bigger drives.
I hope that I will never reach the max limit size of a volume or I hope that Synology will extend this limit in the future. But at the moment, this limit is still far away from me.
That’s exactly the way I have done it. I populated only 4 drives and extended the volume when needed. But it was way too fast, that I had all drive bays populated.
I put all of the hard drives from the old NAS to the new one and the three new drives in the old NAS.
