Using Synology's Point-and-Click Interface: A Seamless Experience

When it comes to managing and updating software on a NAS appliance, many users may find that point-and-click interfaces are easier to use. However, Synology's approach to software management is actually quite comprehensive and offers a seamless experience for users. With Synology's system in place, the company does put significant work into maintaining their software base and doing testing and synthesis, ensuring that everything works smoothly and efficiently.

The point-and-click interface may seem like an easy solution, but it can sometimes be more headache than necessary. In contrast, Synology's approach requires a bit more effort upfront to set up and maintain the system, but it ultimately pays off in terms of reliability and ease of use. Most NAS appliances from companies behind them actually put work into maintaining their software base, doing testing and synthesis, which is something that Synology does as well.

In case something goes wrong with the system, having multiple Synology devices can provide a safety net. Users can set up snapshots and replication to ensure that they have access to backups of their files at any time. With Synology's software and point-and-click interface, users can browse through their files, use the timeline feature to see where a file was located at a specific point in time, and even cherry-pick individual files without having to restore everything.

One of the benefits of using Synology's drive is that it allows users to access a drive letter on their local PC as well as from the web. This means that users can easily access and share files with others, both locally and remotely. The drive also comes with applications, such as Office, which allows users to create and edit documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in real-time. This makes it easy for teams to collaborate on projects without having to leave their usual workflow.

Synology's drive is powered by open-source software tools that can manipulate file formats, making it capable of handling basic files from Microsoft Office applications like Word and Excel. While the software may not be as fully functional as Microsoft Office, it can still handle a wide range of file types and offers real-time collaboration features, such as adding notes to documents.

Another benefit of using Synology's drive is its ease of use. Users can simply plug in the device, hook it up to their internet connection, and they're good to go. The company also offers a configurator tool that allows users to choose from a range of devices, from entry-level models to more advanced rackmount solutions for enterprise users.

In terms of performance, Synology's drive is capable of handling large amounts of data storage with ease. With the ability to store up to 50 terabytes in a tiny cube, it's clear that this device is designed to handle high-capacity storage needs. The use of helium cooling and heated heat-assisted magnetic recording technology allows for higher storage densities without overheating.

Mechanical Hard Drive Technology: A Rube Goldberg Machine of Data Storage

The technology behind mechanical hard drives is truly fascinating. At its core, a mechanical hard drive consists of a spinning magnetic disk with a ceramic electromagnetic read head held above the magnetic disk by infinitesimal distances using the Bernoulli effect. This allows for precise control over data storage and retrieval.

However, as data storage needs have increased, so too have the complexities of mechanical hard drive technology. The use of helium to reduce air turbulence has become necessary in some cases, while heat-assisted magnetic recording technology uses a laser to heat up the magnetic substrate to facilitate data storage.

The process of writing data to a hard drive involves making tiny changes to the magnetic fields on the disk, which can be achieved using thermals and magnetics. However, as data becomes more complex, the need for precision control over these magnetic fields increases.

Ultimately, mechanical hard drives are essentially Rube Goldberg machines of data storage, relying on a delicate balance of magnetism, thermals, and mechanics to store and retrieve information. The sheer complexity of this technology is truly remarkable, and it's a testament to human ingenuity that we're able to harness the power of magnetic fields to store and retrieve data.

Synology NAS Unit Review: A Seamless Experience

If you're in the market for a new NAS appliance, Synology is definitely worth considering. The company offers a range of devices, from entry-level models to more advanced rackmount solutions for enterprise users. In this review, we'll take a closer look at one of Synology's popular NAS units and explore its features and benefits.

Synology's point-and-click interface is designed to be easy to use, even for those who are new to NAS appliances. The device comes with a range of applications, including Office, which allows users to create and edit documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in real-time. This makes it easy for teams to collaborate on projects without having to leave their usual workflow.

One of the standout features of Synology's drive is its ease of use. Users can simply plug in the device, hook it up to their internet connection, and they're good to go. The company also offers a configurator tool that allows users to choose from a range of devices, making it easy to find the perfect solution for your needs.

In terms of performance, Synology's drive is capable of handling large amounts of data storage with ease. With the ability to store up to 50 terabytes in a tiny cube, it's clear that this device is designed to handle high-capacity storage needs. The use of helium cooling and heated heat-assisted magnetic recording technology allows for higher storage densities without overheating.

Overall, Synology's NAS unit offers a seamless experience for users. With its easy-to-use interface, range of applications, and advanced features like snapshots and replication, it's clear that this device is designed to meet the needs of even the most demanding users. Whether you're looking for a simple storage solution or a powerful tool for collaboration, Synology's NAS unit is definitely worth considering.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enin the current situation we find ourselves in everybody's working from home and i just wanted to show off the features that synology has baked into their nas units because these are quiet these belong in every small office and every home office they can play different roles now here at level one we have a ridiculous insane storage server but that doesn't mean that i still can't run some applications in the linuxc underbelly goodness of this synology it's just point and click in case you didn't know the cloud is other people's computers what most people don't understand about amazon is that it's five nines of reliability overall it's not necessarily five nines for you the customer your stuff can be horribly broken and terrible and everybody else's stuff can be fine and that's still five nines it doesn't count that you know amazon's not saying your stuff is gonna experience five nines of uptime they're just saying that their infrastructure in general will experience five nines of uptime now you might be thinking well you've covered active backup in the past like synology active backup for business and some of the other utilities that are just point and click install and synology if i have a remote workforce and we're using drive can we also use some of the other synology features to back up my entire remote workforce computers to the synology yes yes you absolutely can so that was actually not the cloud that was powered by this thing this is the synology ds920 plus now in case it's not clear what we were doing here with this shared office document was my intern and i were sort of sending little notes to one another back and forth in real time that's part of the feature of synology office when you're using synology drive yeah it's a drive storage thing but the hosting software that's actually running under nas has the ability to actually open the files in the browser now of course if you have other devices hooked up to drive like i've got my linux machine here hooked up to drive you can open them natively in libra office but you can also convert them and actually open them online and have that real-time collaboration just like g suite now if you are an office 365 user or a g suite user you don't have to go all in even though i had the same functionality a very similar basic functionality as g suite you know document sharing i'm editing a document and somebody else is adding a document at the same time and we can send comments to each other and do all the office sharing stuff you can mix and match actually run office 365 or your google g suite and back it all up to here automatically this thing can connect to your g suite or your office 365 and pull it down it's pretty awesome yeah yeah yeah enough jibber jabbering let's just see how to install that well first you go to the software center you point and click you want to install drive and you want to install office that's it it'll go through go through some configuration go through some wizards you're good to go have you forgotten what your synology's ip address is on the network no problem just go to find.synology.com because of some browser security and some other stuff like that it'll actually take you to quickconnect.io quickconnect.io is sort of a little sandbox that will let uh the browser scan your local network but because it is sandboxed it won't let whatever it finds on your local network scan be reported to the cloud or the internet because spying and stuff which is a feature i can appreciate so if it's just that easy two clicks two installs this video could have been 30 seconds long there's got to be a catch what's the catch well with google drive they actually do back up your stuff and provide some version control and some ability to recover in the event of an outage or some other problem and that's the only thing that we haven't really talked about the way that i'm accomplishing that is i've got another one of these units in the basement of my house and setting up this thing to replicate to the one at my house is pretty easy because of the way snapshots work and because of the way passwords and the controls and stuff like that work i've got this thing replicating to the other synology and so let's say ransomware happens ransomware's going to encrypt all the files and let's say my drives are almost full 10 terabyte drives but i've only got 2 terabytes of free space the ransomware is going to go through here it's encrypting all the files it got started at five o'clock on a friday nobody's going to touch this over the weekend because you know we're partying animals around here wow that was my knuckles nobody's going to touch this over the weekend because you know of course we're party animals we're not super nerds we're going to roll in monday double click on a file it's like oh your files have been encrypted blah blah this thing will have replicated to the one off site an offsite replica not necessarily a backup but the way that i've configured my offsite replica it actually has uh snapshots and the snapshots are configured to be more important so as it was getting the replicated data it didn't really have enough space to hold the encrypted data you know because i only have two terabytes of free space plus my replicas but i've got my replicas set up to be important so that thing just stopped accepting changes from this thing and sent me an email and if i'd been paying attention to my email over the weekend then i would know hey uh there's something very wrong because many terabytes of information have changed on the nas now one thing that i will caution you on if you are going to open up your nas to the internet you're going to forward a port or allow inbound http connections or allow inbound drive connections you're not going to use a vpn you absolutely must keep the operating system that's the synology firmware that's the linux underbelly you must keep that up to date and you must update it regularly you can set it to auto update but that's something you should still check on at least once a month as a system administrator you also should update the applications they can you know update separately if you are using something like docker you know you're sort of venturing outside the point-and-click installation that synology offers you're going to have to update those docker containers from time to time too it's not super common that there's a privilege escalation out of docker into something more severe docker's definitely the safer way to run these kinds of services especially when you're sort of coloring outside the lines we did the the pie hole video where we talked about doing ad filtering on your synology which works really well with steam cache on your synology that also works really well doing those kinds of things a little outside the synology use case but linux underbelly it does a really good job so if you want to do those kinds of things you definitely need to keep up with your updates as long as it's on the internet but other than that you can pretty much go hog wild and be reasonably safe and have a pretty awesome point-and-click experience now yes yes you can diy this you can absolutely diy the office sharing and everything else but in terms of maintaining that system doing the updates making sure the software is up to date and making sure everything works it's going to be a little bit more headache and a little bit more uptime than a point-and-click interface most nas appliances the companies behind them do actually put work into maintaining their software base and doing testing and synology is no different and in the event that something does go wrong you've got the option of setting up more than one synology just buy another synology set up snapshots and replication you can browse files you know you can browse your backups you can use a timeline and see where the file was at a point in time somebody might have corrupted the really important presentation and you don't notice for a couple of weeks well you can roll back with synology software and the point-and-click gui just use the timeline it's really easy and you can just cherry pick that one file you don't have to restore everything if you've got replication and something terrible happens to this nas you can just spin everything up on the remote nas or you know pull something down from synology's cloud because we've covered that before and that actually does work really well so to recap the things that you saw here that was basically seamless we got synology drive you can access a drive letter on your local pc as well as from the web and get to applications all of your applications and files and crap like that can be stored on your synology your documents anything that you need to keep any documents that are on your remote workforce's pcs they can be stored here or replicated from their pcs to here that's synology drive if you want to do document sharing with real time collaboration that's office office runs on top of drive so that gives you the functionality to open up say a word document that somebody has uploaded or an excel spreadsheet or well let's just call it word processing documents or spreadsheets that kind of thing the format does matter a little bit because this is open source tools that we're using to manipulate um these file formats and so it's sometimes not quite as fully functional as microsoft office or applications but it can deal with basic files of those formats you do real-time collaboration adding notes to one another and that kind of thing which is pretty awesome most people don't realize that that kind of functionality exists in open source software and companies like synology can leverage that in their products for a really seamless user experience it's really awesome software and the fact that synology makes it so easy is you know point and click is you can just pick this up as an appliance and sort of be off to the races and you don't have to pay really high monthly fees you just buy the hardware hook it up on your internet connection you're good to go be sure to check out their synology configurator because you can get you know lower end synology devices all the way up through multi-bay rack mount solutions for the enterprise just depends on what you want but they've got the same synology software stack and you know of course the rackmount system's gonna be able to handle a lot more docker containers and a lot more files a lot more throughput than you know old bessie here but i could put 40 50 terabytes in here with redundancy no problem caching the whole nine yards i mean just a quiet cube anyway thanks synology for sending over the nas unit and letting me play with the software i appreciate it it's been a lot of fun i'm wendell this is level one i'm signing out i'll catch you later as a fun aside if you haven't looked into how mechanical hard drives work every time i think about the information density on mechanical hard drives mechanical hard drives are basically rube goldberg machines of data storage i mean it's a spinning magnetic disk with a ceramic electromagnetic read right head that's held above the magnetic disk by just infinitesimal distances by the bernoulli effect and sometimes we have to use helium because air is too turbulent and the coils hit a certain spot and then we have heated heat assisted magnetic recording which might use a laser to heat things up because a regular magnetic field won't take unless we have a strong magnetic field because of the the heat from the thing and we don't want to flip nearby bits so we can use a weaker magnetic field as long as it's hot so let's use a laser to do that because thermals and magnetics they overlap a little bit but not too much and then things get sort of crazy from a quantum mechanical tunneling standpoint and then oh we're going to uh you know make the the bits taller into the recording magnetic substrate and it's they're basically rube goldberg machines of data storage it's really just insane how mechanical hard drives work and it always blows my mind whenever i can do something like 50 terabytes in a tiny cubein the current situation we find ourselves in everybody's working from home and i just wanted to show off the features that synology has baked into their nas units because these are quiet these belong in every small office and every home office they can play different roles now here at level one we have a ridiculous insane storage server but that doesn't mean that i still can't run some applications in the linuxc underbelly goodness of this synology it's just point and click in case you didn't know the cloud is other people's computers what most people don't understand about amazon is that it's five nines of reliability overall it's not necessarily five nines for you the customer your stuff can be horribly broken and terrible and everybody else's stuff can be fine and that's still five nines it doesn't count that you know amazon's not saying your stuff is gonna experience five nines of uptime they're just saying that their infrastructure in general will experience five nines of uptime now you might be thinking well you've covered active backup in the past like synology active backup for business and some of the other utilities that are just point and click install and synology if i have a remote workforce and we're using drive can we also use some of the other synology features to back up my entire remote workforce computers to the synology yes yes you absolutely can so that was actually not the cloud that was powered by this thing this is the synology ds920 plus now in case it's not clear what we were doing here with this shared office document was my intern and i were sort of sending little notes to one another back and forth in real time that's part of the feature of synology office when you're using synology drive yeah it's a drive storage thing but the hosting software that's actually running under nas has the ability to actually open the files in the browser now of course if you have other devices hooked up to drive like i've got my linux machine here hooked up to drive you can open them natively in libra office but you can also convert them and actually open them online and have that real-time collaboration just like g suite now if you are an office 365 user or a g suite user you don't have to go all in even though i had the same functionality a very similar basic functionality as g suite you know document sharing i'm editing a document and somebody else is adding a document at the same time and we can send comments to each other and do all the office sharing stuff you can mix and match actually run office 365 or your google g suite and back it all up to here automatically this thing can connect to your g suite or your office 365 and pull it down it's pretty awesome yeah yeah yeah enough jibber jabbering let's just see how to install that well first you go to the software center you point and click you want to install drive and you want to install office that's it it'll go through go through some configuration go through some wizards you're good to go have you forgotten what your synology's ip address is on the network no problem just go to find.synology.com because of some browser security and some other stuff like that it'll actually take you to quickconnect.io quickconnect.io is sort of a little sandbox that will let uh the browser scan your local network but because it is sandboxed it won't let whatever it finds on your local network scan be reported to the cloud or the internet because spying and stuff which is a feature i can appreciate so if it's just that easy two clicks two installs this video could have been 30 seconds long there's got to be a catch what's the catch well with google drive they actually do back up your stuff and provide some version control and some ability to recover in the event of an outage or some other problem and that's the only thing that we haven't really talked about the way that i'm accomplishing that is i've got another one of these units in the basement of my house and setting up this thing to replicate to the one at my house is pretty easy because of the way snapshots work and because of the way passwords and the controls and stuff like that work i've got this thing replicating to the other synology and so let's say ransomware happens ransomware's going to encrypt all the files and let's say my drives are almost full 10 terabyte drives but i've only got 2 terabytes of free space the ransomware is going to go through here it's encrypting all the files it got started at five o'clock on a friday nobody's going to touch this over the weekend because you know we're partying animals around here wow that was my knuckles nobody's going to touch this over the weekend because you know of course we're party animals we're not super nerds we're going to roll in monday double click on a file it's like oh your files have been encrypted blah blah this thing will have replicated to the one off site an offsite replica not necessarily a backup but the way that i've configured my offsite replica it actually has uh snapshots and the snapshots are configured to be more important so as it was getting the replicated data it didn't really have enough space to hold the encrypted data you know because i only have two terabytes of free space plus my replicas but i've got my replicas set up to be important so that thing just stopped accepting changes from this thing and sent me an email and if i'd been paying attention to my email over the weekend then i would know hey uh there's something very wrong because many terabytes of information have changed on the nas now one thing that i will caution you on if you are going to open up your nas to the internet you're going to forward a port or allow inbound http connections or allow inbound drive connections you're not going to use a vpn you absolutely must keep the operating system that's the synology firmware that's the linux underbelly you must keep that up to date and you must update it regularly you can set it to auto update but that's something you should still check on at least once a month as a system administrator you also should update the applications they can you know update separately if you are using something like docker you know you're sort of venturing outside the point-and-click installation that synology offers you're going to have to update those docker containers from time to time too it's not super common that there's a privilege escalation out of docker into something more severe docker's definitely the safer way to run these kinds of services especially when you're sort of coloring outside the lines we did the the pie hole video where we talked about doing ad filtering on your synology which works really well with steam cache on your synology that also works really well doing those kinds of things a little outside the synology use case but linux underbelly it does a really good job so if you want to do those kinds of things you definitely need to keep up with your updates as long as it's on the internet but other than that you can pretty much go hog wild and be reasonably safe and have a pretty awesome point-and-click experience now yes yes you can diy this you can absolutely diy the office sharing and everything else but in terms of maintaining that system doing the updates making sure the software is up to date and making sure everything works it's going to be a little bit more headache and a little bit more uptime than a point-and-click interface most nas appliances the companies behind them do actually put work into maintaining their software base and doing testing and synology is no different and in the event that something does go wrong you've got the option of setting up more than one synology just buy another synology set up snapshots and replication you can browse files you know you can browse your backups you can use a timeline and see where the file was at a point in time somebody might have corrupted the really important presentation and you don't notice for a couple of weeks well you can roll back with synology software and the point-and-click gui just use the timeline it's really easy and you can just cherry pick that one file you don't have to restore everything if you've got replication and something terrible happens to this nas you can just spin everything up on the remote nas or you know pull something down from synology's cloud because we've covered that before and that actually does work really well so to recap the things that you saw here that was basically seamless we got synology drive you can access a drive letter on your local pc as well as from the web and get to applications all of your applications and files and crap like that can be stored on your synology your documents anything that you need to keep any documents that are on your remote workforce's pcs they can be stored here or replicated from their pcs to here that's synology drive if you want to do document sharing with real time collaboration that's office office runs on top of drive so that gives you the functionality to open up say a word document that somebody has uploaded or an excel spreadsheet or well let's just call it word processing documents or spreadsheets that kind of thing the format does matter a little bit because this is open source tools that we're using to manipulate um these file formats and so it's sometimes not quite as fully functional as microsoft office or applications but it can deal with basic files of those formats you do real-time collaboration adding notes to one another and that kind of thing which is pretty awesome most people don't realize that that kind of functionality exists in open source software and companies like synology can leverage that in their products for a really seamless user experience it's really awesome software and the fact that synology makes it so easy is you know point and click is you can just pick this up as an appliance and sort of be off to the races and you don't have to pay really high monthly fees you just buy the hardware hook it up on your internet connection you're good to go be sure to check out their synology configurator because you can get you know lower end synology devices all the way up through multi-bay rack mount solutions for the enterprise just depends on what you want but they've got the same synology software stack and you know of course the rackmount system's gonna be able to handle a lot more docker containers and a lot more files a lot more throughput than you know old bessie here but i could put 40 50 terabytes in here with redundancy no problem caching the whole nine yards i mean just a quiet cube anyway thanks synology for sending over the nas unit and letting me play with the software i appreciate it it's been a lot of fun i'm wendell this is level one i'm signing out i'll catch you later as a fun aside if you haven't looked into how mechanical hard drives work every time i think about the information density on mechanical hard drives mechanical hard drives are basically rube goldberg machines of data storage i mean it's a spinning magnetic disk with a ceramic electromagnetic read right head that's held above the magnetic disk by just infinitesimal distances by the bernoulli effect and sometimes we have to use helium because air is too turbulent and the coils hit a certain spot and then we have heated heat assisted magnetic recording which might use a laser to heat things up because a regular magnetic field won't take unless we have a strong magnetic field because of the the heat from the thing and we don't want to flip nearby bits so we can use a weaker magnetic field as long as it's hot so let's use a laser to do that because thermals and magnetics they overlap a little bit but not too much and then things get sort of crazy from a quantum mechanical tunneling standpoint and then oh we're going to uh you know make the the bits taller into the recording magnetic substrate and it's they're basically rube goldberg machines of data storage it's really just insane how mechanical hard drives work and it always blows my mind whenever i can do something like 50 terabytes in a tiny cube\n"