Synology C2 Archives

Synology 2022 AND BEYOND

Synology, Synology C2, Synology DiskStation No Responses »

Dec 022021

As I’m watching the Synology: 2022 AND BEYOND event live I wanted to write this post to share with you some of my favorite parts.

For those of you wanting to tune in (while live) or watch the replay you can view it below.

You can also visit: https://event.synology.com/en-us/annual_event to watch the stream (or replay) and find out more information.

DSM 7.0.1 and DSM 7.1

As an IT professional and enthusiast, here’s a list of some of my favorite new features, functionalities and improvements.

DSM 7.0.1

High Availability Improvements
- 40% less time needed for failovers and switchovers
- 80% less time needed for system updates
System Responsiveness and Performance enhancements
- 56x faster SMB (Windows File Share) searches
- 70% speed up in application launches
- 80% faster RAID 6 performance (for double parity RAID)
Enhanced Drive Replacement
- Replace predicted failure/presumed unhealthy/to-be-retired drives with unused healthy drives that are in other bays.
- Switch without degrading your array/storage pool
Auto Drive Replacement
- Clones predicted failure/presumed unhealthy drive to available hot spare, switching automatically when the drive fails without requiring RAID rebuild time
Volume-wide data deduplication (on all flash arrays)
- Scheduled or Manual Volume Wide Deduplication on all flash volumes
- Click here for information on supported models and configurations
Synology Directory Server
- Secondary domain controllers provide additional redundancy and availability of directory services
- Provides ability to deploy additional domain controllers at additional locations

DSM 7.1 (Coming Soon)

SMB Multichannel
- Utilize multiple network links and network connections to combine speed with SMB (Windows File Share) file transfers
- Provides redundancy and fault tolerance
DFS Support over SMB
- Combine multiple Synology NAS file servers to provide file services to your network using Distributed File System (DFS)
Active Insight
- Numerous updates to make Active Insight more powerful when it comes to managing numerous Synology NAS units.
- Enhanced control and information on System Updates
- Suspicious activity detection recognizes suspicious activity on the NAS units (example: unusual login times and locations, unused accounts being used after being idle, failed logins, etc).
- Task monitoring for Hyper Backup
Synology Directory
- Read-only domain controller support provides ability to deploy read only domain controllers at remote sites that may not be physically secure while providing local cached copies of the directory.

And that’s not all…

Synology has also made numerous improvements to their Data Protection Services, Surveillance suite, Wireless Networking, Synology C2 Cloud, and more, but you’ll have to check it out for yourself. There are tons of other goodies for office workers, small business owners, photography enthusiast, and more that I haven’t included in this list.

Synology NAS backup to Synology C2 Cloud

Synology, Synology C2, Synology DiskStation, Video Posts 2 Responses »

Oct 092021

One of the new real cool features of the Synology C2 Cloud and Synology DSM 7.0 is the ability to back your Synology DiskStation NAS up to the cloud.

Using the Synology’s “C2 Storage” service, you can use Synology Hyper Backup on DSM 7.0 to backup your your File Shares, NAS, applications, and data to the cloud.

Below, I will show the process of creating a Hyper Backup Backup task to backup a few Synology File Shares to the Synology C2 Storage Service.

NAS Backup (and Restore) with Synology C2 Cloud Video

For a full video guide and demonstration, please enjoy this video! Please continue scrolling for a text guide (with images).

Synology DiskStation NAS Backup (and Restore) with Synology C2 Storage Cloud!

Backup NAS to Synology C2 Storage

It’s very easy to back your NAS up to the cloud. Here’s a quick guide showing how it’s done.

We’re going to assume you already have some File Shares configured on your NAS. These can be Windows File Shares, NFS Exports, and even Active Backup for Business storage repositories. In my case, I want to back up 2 Windows File Shares to the Synology C2 Storage service.

Open Hyper Backup
If you have no existing backup jobs, the “Backup Wizard” should automatically open to configure a new job. If you have existing jobs, select the “+” on the top left of the window.
Under “Backup Destination”, choose “Synology C2 Storage”.
This will open a new window asking you to log on to the Synology C2 Storage Service. You may have to create a new account, or log in with your existing Synology credentials. From here you can start a free trial.
Choose a subscription and plan. You should get a 30-day free trial.
Confirm your subscription
Accept the TOS (Terms of Service)
You must now “Grant access to C2 Storage”. This will allow your user account to access the C2 Storage service.
You will now be presented with information on your Synology C2 Storage Account
You will now be redirected back to Hyper Backup. You’ll need to create a name for the new backup task destination directory.
Here’s where you will configure which File Shares (or volumes) to backup to Synology C2.
You also have the ability to backup Synology Applications. This is helpful should you wish to backup your entire Synology NAS to Synology’s C2 cloud. I’m only doing shares, so I hit next without selecting anything.
Now we will configure the Backup Task settings. This includes the task name, notifications, file change logs, bandwidth limits, backup schedule, and integrity check schedule. We can also “Enable client-side encryption” which we will use to encrypt the data on the cloud.
After proceeding, we will now configure backup rotation settings. I enabled backup rotation with “Smart Recycle”.
If you enabled encryption, you will be prompted to download your encryption key. Save this file in a safe location as you will need it in the event your NAS fails and you need to access your cloud storage.

And that’s it! You have now configured your NAS to backup to Synology C2 Cloud!

Hyper Backup NAS Backup to Synology C2 Cloud

We have now configured the backup job. Let’s go ahead and kick off a backup by clicking on “Back up now”.

And that’s it! After some time, your backup should complete and you data should be safe on the Synology C2 Cloud.

What happens when your run of out space

This is a question many of you will be asking, and I was curious myself. I went ahead and uploaded a bunch of garbage data to max out my plan.

Synology Hyper Backup C2 Storage - Not enough quota available on the target — Synology Hyper Backup C2 Storage – Not enough quota available on the target

To my surprise Synology allowed me to exceed my plan by a decent amount of storage until the backup job went in to a “Suspended” state reporting “Not enough quota available on the target”. I actually exceeded the storage by 128GB!!! This is extremely generous!

Synology C2 Storage - Storage overage — Synology C2 Storage – Storage overage

To find out how well the NAS would recover from this situation, I logged on to the Synology C2 Storage service and increased my purchased storage. I was able to simply click on “Action” and “Resume” the backup without any issues… It actually resumed where it left off.

Conclusion

The Synology C2 Storage Cloud service is a great option for backing up your DiskStation NAS and all your important files to the cloud. In my case I use my NAS as a backup, and then further backup my NAS both to a removable hard drive, and the Synology C2 Cloud, keeping me compliant with the 3-2-1 backup rule.

The pricing is amazing and there’s extra cost to backup and restore, which means no upload or download costs. They even provide de-duplication so you’re not paying to store duplicated data.

As part of the backup process, Hyper Backup only copies over blocks of data and files that have changed, which significantly helps bandwidth usage as only what’s changed is copied.

I highly recommend using Synology C2 Storage with your Synology DiskStation NAS!

Synology C2 Cloud: Backup and Storage – An easy, powerful, (and awesome) way to backup!

Backup, Synology, Synology C2 1 Response »

Sep 232021

Synology C2 Cloud, C2 Backup and C2 Storage are new ways to backup smart! Using Synology’s C2 Cloud, you can not only back up your Synology DiskStation NAS and all of it’s contents to the cloud, but you can also backup your endpoints directly to the cloud as well now, including Workstations and Servers providing “Centralized protection for Microsoft workloads”.

I want to give a brief overview with what you can do with it, and yes I’ve tried it and so far love it! It works great!

With DSM 7, came a big expansion of Synology’s C2 Cloud Offering

I first heard about Synology C2 Cloud during a VMUG User Group presentation that was sponsored by Synology a few months ago.

I was very impressed with the presentation on the new Synology DSM 7 operating system, it’s capabilities, and the integration with the new Synology C2 Cloud. It really peaked my interest!

With the release of DSM 7.0 (on June 29th 2021), Synology also launched a number of Cloud initiatives delivered by their C2 Cloud platform. This included C2 Transfer, C2 Identity, and C2 Storage. As of today, they have released C2 Backup!

With the fresh release, I want to go over Synology’s C2 Backup, and C2 Storage.

What can we do with C2 Backup and C2 Storage?

The possibilities are almost endless, but let’s list some of the main uses that come to mind:

Backup Synology DiskStation NAS to Synology C2 Cloud
- Backup your Synology DiskStation File Shares
- Backup your Synology Photo Collection and Videos
- Backup your Synology Apps
- Backup your backups to the cloud (disk to disk to cloud)
Active Backup for Business
- Backup Workstations and Servers to NAS, then replicate to Cloud
- Backup Microsoft 365 to NAS, then replicate to Cloud
- Backup Virtual Machines to NAS, then replicate and/or archive to Cloud
Endpoint Backup direct to Synology C2 Backup
- Backup a Windows Desktop or Laptop directly to Synology C2 Cloud

One of the biggest threats we have today is ransomware. Ransomware has been ravaging businesses and corporations, destroying and deleting their backups and holding the companies at hostage. It’s even effected the home user, holding their private and valuable files on their computers and NAS devices hostage.

Another common threat is general disasters, including hardware failure, fires, and other events causing complete loss of data.

Using both the Synology DiskStation and the Synology C2 Cloud we can mitigate these risks by backing up your data.

And with any backup, we should always abide by the 3-2-1 rule having 3 copies, on 2 different platforms/media types, and one off-site. Backing up to your Synology NAS and then replicating it up to Synology C2 cloud, you can achieve this level of protection.

Synology C2 Cloud also provides C2 Identify and C2 transfer for business services, which I won’t cover in this post.

Use Case Examples

Below I’ll list a few of the most common uses cases I would expect.

Home or Small Business File Share backup

For home or small business users, file and data storage is typically handled via Windows Shares, and the Synology DiskStation NAS is perfect for providing this type of storage.

Using the Synology DiskStation, you can back these shares to Synology’s C2 Storage Service further protecting your data and also keeping it off-site. You can still also backup to other sources such as removable hard drives.

Complete NAS backup

You can now fully backup your entire NAS to the Synology C2 Storage service. Providing an easy way to restore it, should you ever have a disaster including ransomware, a catastrophic failure, or fire, and have lost your unit needing to replace it fully.

Active Backup for Business Replication

If you’re using Active Backup for Business, you probably already know you can backup the following to your NAS:

Microsoft Windows Servers
Microsoft Windows Workstation
Microsoft 365 (Office 365) data
VMware Virtual Machines
And more!

Now we have the ability to replicate these backups to Synology’s C2 Storage service, to further protect our backups and also archive data.

Endpoint Backup (new with Synology C2 Backup)

Now you can backup Microsoft Windows endpoints (workstations, laptops, and tablets) directly to the Synology C2 Backup service!

You can backup an unlimited numbers of Microsoft endpoints with the only limitation being how much storage you’re paying for.

Endpoint backups include full-system backups (using incremental updates to save bandwidth), and provide bare mental restore capabilities, as well as file-level recovery when you only need to grab a few files from a backup without restoring the entire system.

You also have the ability to deploy the C2 Backup agent via Active Directory GPOs for ease of deployment.

And don’t forget, this is a perfect way to backup mobile users with laptops!

Is it Encrypted?

One question you might be asking is if the data is safe and encrypted. It sure is (if you enable it)!

The Synology C2 Cloud provides client-side encryption using AES 256-bit encryption with private keys.

In my testing when enabled, the data is encrypted on my Synology DiskStation NAS and then uploaded to Synology’s C2 Cloud. Encryption is handled via a password and a PEM key (AES 256) that you must save and keep safe (preferably not on any of your computers, but on a USB key somewhere safe)! Hold on to this, because you’ll need it in the event of a disaster.

In the case of C2 Storage, while the data is encrypted and then stored on Synology’s servers, there are some actions you can take via a web interface to view/download your data to your computer, instead of restoring to your NAS. Keep in mind if you do this, you’ll need to enter your password in to Synology’s servers, however they state the password will not be saved and will be destroyed after the task completion.

In the case of C2 Backup, you’ll have a powerful web interface where you can manage backups, restore backups, restore files, and more.

How much does it cost?

For the C2 Storage Service, the pricing table below (US Dollars):

For the C2 Backup Service, the pricing table is below (US Dollars):

You’ll notice that right now the C2 Backup Service is limited to only a 300GB plan and 2TB plan.

Features to come

While you can today deploy any of the features listed in this post, there are some future capabilities that are coming soon…

Soon, using Synology C2 Backup, you’ll be able to automatically backup your Microsoft 365 data (including Exchange Online and OneDrive for Business) direct to Synology’s C2 Backup.

While you can already back this data up to your NAS (and then replicate to C2 Storage), soon you’ll be able to cutout the NAS and have it go direct.

In conclusion

I’d highly recommend checking out the Synology C2 Cloud portfolio of services as I’ve already deployed and am currently using the Synology C2 Storage service in my homelab with my Synology DiskStation NAS.

Synology also has another datacenter available to choose from Germany.

More information can be found at the following links:

C2 FAQ

Synology C2 Backup (for business)

Synology C2 Transfer (for business)

Synology C2 Identity (for business)

Synology C2 Storage (for business)

Pricing information can be found at the following links:

Synology C2 Backup Pricing (for business)

Synology C2 Storage Pricing (for business)

I’ll be posting some tutorials and reviews so stay tuned! In the meantime, leave a comment if you’ve used any of these products in your environment!

Synology C2 Firewall Exceptions for C2 Backup, and C2 Storage

Synology, Synology C2 2 Responses »

Sep 132021

So if you’re like me, you’ve just deployed your Synology DiskStation DSM NAS to backup to the Synology C2 Cloud (C2 Backup) or access Synology Hybrid Shares (C2 Storage).

But wait, you’re having issues with disconnections or slow speeds? It could be your firewall!

If you have an advanced firewall or an enterprise grade firewall, you’ll need to make some exceptions to avoid HTTPS scanning and interception, IPS, and other mechanisms that could be blocking traffic destined for the Synology’s C2 Cloud.

The Problem

While I wouldn’t necessarily call it a problem, your Synology NAS uses HTTPS (Port 443) to connect to Synology’s C2 Cloud. This actually makes things very easy and in most cases works off the bat with most firewalls.

When it comes to more complicated firewalls or enterprise firewalls, you may have the following technologies deployed which could be causing connection issues to the Synology C2 Cloud:

HTTPS Scanning
IPS (Intrusion Prevention System)
Traffic tagging and identification
QoS

The above technologies may either be slowing down or causing issues with communication.

The Fix

Here’s how we’ll configure the Synology C2 Firewall Exceptions!

To fix this, we need to make a few exceptions on the firewall. In my case I’m using a Sophos UTM, however using the information below you should be able to create rules for your own firewall even if the vendor is different.

First, let’s start with Synology’s C2 Cloud DNS hostnames, domains, and IP ranges. I identified these through my own troubleshooting and packet analysis:

Synology C2 Cloud DNS

synology.com
c2.synology.com
us.c2.synology.com

Synology C2 IP Range (CIDR Block)

66.150.175.0/24

Please Note that the above are for the Synology C2 Cloud datacenter in the US region.

We’ll need to create exception rules for the above hosts, and IP range to avoid any type of traffic interception or scanning.

HTTPS Scanning Exclusion

On the Sophos UTM, I created an exception on the HTTPS Scanner to exclude any type of scanning for web (HTTP and HTTPS) traffic destined for these hosts. The entries in the exception are below:

^https?://([A-Za-z0-9.-]*\.)?synology\.com/
^https?://([A-Za-z0-9.-]*\.)?c2\.synology\.com/
^https?://([A-Za-z0-9.-]*\.)?us\.c2\.synology\.com/

I also created a Network Definition Group (called it Synology C2 Group) for the IP CIDR range, along with the DNS hostnames, and added it to the transport mode skiplist under “Skip Transparent Destination Hosts/Nets”.

IPS (Intrusion Prevention)

IPS systems can slow down traffic significantly as they scan inbound and outbound data. This shouldn’t disrupt the connection to the Synology C2 Cloud, but will slow it down.

Using the network definition created above (Synology C2 Group), we’ll go to the IPS settings and create an exception. We’ll disable all IPS features on traffic “Going to these destinations” and apply it to the “Synology C2 Group” network group definition.

QoS and other Systems

You’ll also want to make sure that if your using QoS that you configure the applicable rules to put the priority you want on the Synology C2 Cloud traffic.

After that, you should be good to go and now enjoying the Synology C2 Cloud!