Part 4 of 4 — Getting Started with Your Synology · ← Choose Your Path
Last one in this series, and arguably the one that matters most: actual backups. We said it back in Part 1 and it’s worth repeating on its own — RAID protects you from a drive dying. It does nothing for the drive that gets ransomware, the folder you delete by accident, or the NAS itself getting stolen, flooded, or fried. Those need a real backup strategy, and DSM gives you two different tools for two different problems.
Two different tools, two different jobs
Snapshot Replication takes near-instant, space-efficient point-in-time snapshots of a Btrfs volume. It’s built for “I deleted the wrong folder ten minutes ago” — fast to restore from, but it lives on the same physical NAS as the data it’s protecting.
Hyper Backup makes an actual copy of your data somewhere else entirely — another NAS, a USB/eSATA drive, or a cloud target. It’s built for “the NAS itself is gone,” which a snapshot living on that same NAS can’t help with at all.
Step 1 — Confirm you’re on Btrfs
Snapshot Replication only works on Btrfs volumes, not the older ext4 format. Check in Storage Manager → Volume — if you followed the SHR recommendation from Part 1 on a reasonably current DSM install, you’re almost certainly already on Btrfs. If not, this is the one thing on this list that requires rebuilding the volume to fix, so it’s worth checking early rather than discovering it later.
Step 2 — Set up Snapshot Replication
Install Snapshot Replication from Package Center, then create a snapshot schedule per shared folder that actually matters — your Docker config volumes, your documents, whatever you’d be upset to lose an hour of. Hourly snapshots with a reasonable retention window (DSM lets you keep more recent ones and fewer old ones automatically) cost surprisingly little space thanks to Btrfs’s copy-on-write design — it’s only storing the changes, not full copies each time.
Step 3 — Set up Hyper Backup to somewhere that isn’t this NAS
Install Hyper Backup and pick a destination that survives this physical NAS failing entirely: a second NAS at a different location, a cloud target (Synology C2, Backblaze B2, or any S3-compatible bucket all work), or at minimum an external drive you actually disconnect and store elsewhere between backups. Back up the things Snapshot Replication is also covering, plus anything Docker-related — your compose files and container configs are small and painful to reconstruct from memory.
Step 4 — Actually test a restore
A backup you’ve never restored from is a theory, not a backup. Pick something low-stakes and actually run the restore process once, now, while it doesn’t matter — not the first time it’s the middle of an actual emergency.
That’s the full series: from an unboxed NAS to a media server with an actual safety net under it. If you followed all five parts, you’re in meaningfully better shape than “it’s been running fine so far” — which is what a surprising number of home NAS setups are quietly running on.
Start from the top: Part 1 — First-Time DSM Setup