synology cloud station drive vs cloud station backup

SYNOLOGY CLOUD STATION DRIVE VS CLOUD STATION BACKUP UPGRADE
SYNOLOGY CLOUD STATION DRIVE VS CLOUD STATION BACKUP FREE

Unfortunately, you cannot disable Cloud Station for the default user home folder without completely removing the package.

SYNOLOGY CLOUD STATION DRIVE VS CLOUD STATION BACKUP FREE

Simply turning off versioning does NOT free up your space. The only way to reclaim this additional overhead is to disable Cloud Station for that folder. So if you don't want to sync locally and just want to use a shared network drive but still wanted to use Cloud Station file versioning you can but you will double your storage footprint. Additional versions are incremental so don't take much more room but the initial hit can be substantial, especially on large folders. Confusing.Īdding to the confusion, enabling Cloud Station for a folder creates a shadow copy of all files in the versioning database, doubling your storage requirements. Let me be clear: you have to enable Cloud Station sync for a folder to turn on versioning but you do not have to use Cloud Station sync to access those files or use versioning. But you can also continue to access that shared folder as a network drive and versioning still works. You can then use the Cloud Station Drive client to sync with that target folder (or a subset of that folder).

In Cloud Station you can enable file sync for additional folders (beyond the default user home folder) and then enable versioning for those folders. Presumably, because you're in the user home folder you can use Cloud Station file versioning but you can't use the right-click method since the folders you're backing up aren't in a Cloud Station Drive source location. On the server, you'll see the most recent version of all files, including any files that you deleted or renamed on the client. That backup location is then excluded from the Cloud Station Drive client (so you don’t re-download your backups when you sync). The default backup location is within the existing /home/CloudStation/ folder. It stays up-to-date as you add and change files, functioning as a variation on a synced directory that preserves deleted files on the server and excludes temp files. (Apparently, this was all here under DSM 5 but I never noticed it and I'm not sure it had the same flexibility.)īut wait, there's more! There's now a new Cloud Station Backup client utility that lets you back up any local folder to Cloud Station. Version history can be accessed by the user thought a right-click context menu on the file or through the DSM interface, so that's cool, although there's no diff tool or way to preview what changed. It also does file versioning and preserves deleted files.

DropBox) into a flexible bidirectional synchronization tool. Yeah, I know there are a bunch of other tools that can do this, so no biggie, but it was nice to have as an option.Īt the same time, Cloud Station has evolved from a simple “magic folder” (e.g.

SYNOLOGY CLOUD STATION DRIVE VS CLOUD STATION BACKUP UPGRADE

Strangely, my old copy job survived the upgrade and continued to run, but there is no way to create a new job like that.

No grabbing that external drive and plugging it into another system. Versioning is better in most ways, but it does require going through DSM to get at the data.

USB drives) but loses the ability to do a simple differential backup to USB, which is what I had been doing. Hyper Backup allows multi-version, database-driven backups to both volumes AND mount points (e.g. With DSM 6.0, the old Backup & Replication is gone, replaced by Hyper Backup. Tracking deleted files is also very similar to turning on the recycle bin for a shared folder. The new Cloud Station Backup client utility adds to the confusion about what and how you backup files. The inclusion of versioning in Cloud Station strikes me as problematic because 1) versioning is completely unrelated to file synch and 2) it does something very similar to Hyper Backup. I would love to hear what others think, if my conclusions are correct, and what you find as the best use-cases for each. There seems to be a lot of confusion and overlap between the two. I've had a couple of days to play with the new DSM 6.0 and especially the changes to Cloud Station and Hyper Backup.

Synology cloud station drive vs cloud station backup