From Synology to openmediavault

After running a Synology DS213 for 11 years, I decided to move on and try openmediavault. The reason is that Synology will stop supporting my particular model in a few months and I won't receive any more updates. This is a concern for me since I value security a lot.

Deciding

My goal was to have a backup server at a minimum, that's the main purpose my Synology was serving. I'm also running a few networking services in a Raspberry Pi and want to start running some more, thus being able to run docker in the same device was interesting.

After considering the available options I ended up looking into either a new Synology or trying out openmediavault.

New Synology

The old Synology is still great and I'm very happy with it. Newer versions add new capabilities like running docker, which mine doesn't support.

Loosing support on a machine that still runs well is not really great, so this prompted me to think about alternatives to not run into the same problem in the next decade.

openmediavault

Openmediavault is a NAS OS solution based on Debian Linux. I has all the features I want in a NAS: Shared folders to backup to, rsync, user management and anything you can do in a linux machine really. It also has a nice UI to use Docker and Portainer. I'm thinking that support for the Raspberry Pi 4 would probably be more than 10 years since it's just a linux machine, we'll see.

Another positive is that I can run it with hardware I already have: Raspberry Pi 4 and Hard Drives. I only had to purchase a powered SATA to USB adapter.

The negative is that I lose the ability to do RAID, or really the ability to have a RAID array that would be noticeable since the speed in the Raspberry Pi is already limited by the USB hub. But given that I only want the NAS to serve as an hourly backup destination, I don't really need the speed for data transfer. If a backup takes longer, so be it.

How it's going

For the last 2 weeks the Synology has been turned off and openmediavault has been receiving Time Machine Backups without a hickup. Not much more to say, it was straight forward to set up and it's been running without a problem so far.

If you don't test your backup restoration process, then you don't have a backup. Set up your system to test the restoration process periodically. You don't want to learn that the backups or the restoration process don't work right when you need to recover important data. Mine is tested, working and I have recurrent events in my calendar to test this again every quarter.

Next steps

I need a backup of my NAS. I want 1 local copy and one off site copy to comply with the 3:2:1 rule. The 3:2:1 rule states that one should have 3 copies of important data, 2 on-site on different devices and 1 off-site. But that's a topic for a future post.

What you can do

If you are making the same decision as I have and already have some hardware laying around, I'd encourage you to go ahead and try openmediavault. There's nothing to lose really.

If you have any question please reach out https://twitter.com/MartinLaRosa and subscribe to learn how this progresses!