Synology Active Backup Suite vs. Amazon S3 Glacier

Synology
Active backup is a great low-cost solution to backup your entire
infrastructure, no license cost whatsoever currently, only the only requirement
is using Synology hardware which is great, and we’ve not had any issues with.

Compared to
more mature solutions like Veeam, it’s lacking some tools for restoring data /
elements quickly.

Veeam has
tools to restore databases/data or active directory elements like users, groups
or Ous.

So, if you
need the extra tools for certain applications this isn’t the right tool for
you.

If your organization has a lot of archival data that it needs to be backed up for safekeeping, where it won't be touched except in a dire emergency, Amazon Glacier is perfect. In our case, we had a client that generates many TB of video and photo data at annual events and wanted to retain ALL of it, pre- and post- edit for potential use in a future museum. Using the Snowball device, we were able to move hundreds of TB of existing media data that was previously housed on multiple Thunderbolt drives, external RAIDs, etc, in an organized manner, to Amazon Glacier. Then, we were able to setup CloudBerry Backup on their production computers to continually backup any new media that they generated during their annual events.

Incentivized

• The interface to browse and restore files from the cloud backups is super-easy. As in drop-down boxes to select which account and then files and be exported for restore - no training needed to use it.
• The Synology device is fast on the network - 4 x 1Gbps NICs
• Updating itself
• Being Reliable as a permanently on 24/7 device

Incentivized

• Cheap storage of backup data.
• Can be used as a part of the entire suite of tools from Amazon, without requiring you to leave the familiar stack.

Incentivized

• Agent Download more easily
• More detail information's on dates, and what was backup

Incentivized

• Sometime due to slow drives there are operation failure noticed by us in testing
• Cost of restoring data is high and if you have regular restoring them it is not good option and slow as well.
• While we were setting up the system we took some support from AWS and in many cases their answers were not up to the mark.

Incentivized

The usability
of the suite is excellent, all tools are web based so no client or server to
remote into. It has a separate portal to restore data, you can give access to
users if you want them to be able to restore their own data.

Restoring
files or a whole server/vm is very easy to do, it just lacks the functionality
of some of the more established backup solutions.

With being
a Veeam user for many years, the comfort of the extra tools to restore a single
database or a single active directory user, I’ve grown used to Veeam’s tools.

It is difficult to delete the data as you have to wait for inventory and then bucket modification has to expire.

Incentivized

Centralized system for multiples systems

Incentivized

Since the rest of our infrastructure is in Amazon AWS, coding for sending data to Glacier just makes sense. The others are great as well, for their specific needs and uses, but having *another* third-party software to manage, be billed for, and learn/utilize can be costly in money and time.

Incentivized

• Positive is obviously being a main part of the backup strategy along with quick data restoration.

Incentivized

• We seldom need to access our data in Glacier; this means that it is a fraction of the cost of S3, including the infrequent-access storage class.
• Transitioning data to Glacier is managed by AWS. We don't need our engineers to build or maintain log pipelines.
• Configuring lifecycle policies for S3 and Glacier is simple; it takes our engineers very little time, and there is little risk of errant configuration.

Incentivized