NAKIVO Backup & Replication vs. Synology DiskStation

NAKIVO Backup & Replication is well suited for a variety of scenarios. Firstly, it is ideal for businesses with virtualized environments, such as VMware or Hyper-V, as it offers seamless backup and recovery solutions tailored to these platforms. Secondly, organizations with a mix of virtual, physical, and cloud environments can benefit from NAKIVO's ability to provide unified data protection across these platforms. Additionally, businesses requiring fast and reliable disaster recovery capabilities will find NAKIVO Backup & Replication valuable, thanks to its site recovery and orchestration features.However, there are scenarios where NAKIVO may be less appropriate. For organizations with exclusively physical infrastructure and no virtualized environments, the full range of NAKIVO's features may not be utilized to its fullest potential. Similarly, companies with limited data storage requirements may not fully benefit from NAKIVO's deduplication and compression capabilities.

The Synology DiskStation is well suited as a NAS solution, easy enough to mirror a Windows file server shares setup. Access to the Hyperbackup utility eliminates the need to purchase a tape backup solution. A portable USB drive can be used as the initial backup target. For air gap purposes can connect Hyperbackup to the various cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, GCP to copy backup data there. Utilizing it as a backup solution has also been great, instead of purchasing a tape solution, tapes and an offsite tape repository. Active Backup for Business is another excellent backup utility for physical servers, VMWare virtual machines, etc. Restoring files is fairly intuitive. Until Synology introduced the dual controller setup, using it as a SAN was less appropriate as there was occasional downtime when the controller had an issue but this was less important for the scenarios we were using it for. It would be more of a concern if we had used it for things that require more robust uptime requirements. Overall we are happy with the features of the Synology DiskStation.

Incentivized

• Can be installed natively on nas appliances leveraging the use of underutilized appliances. No need to install the software on Windows or Linux Servers.
• Backup natively Vmware Virtual Machines and File Shares (you need to buy the right license modules).
• Destination storage for backups (or of the backup copies) can be Microsoft shares, Amazon S3, Wasabi, Backblaze and remotely to other sites using their transporter vm.
• To not overload the system with overlapping jobs, they can be chained one after the other.
• Rapid add/remove/reorder priority of vm to backup and their backup archive. Jobs can be easily changed or chained.
• Quick support service

Incentivized

• Synology DiskStation offers lots of options for creating links to share files or request that some uploads files. It makes it really easy to just share a link that can have an expiration or a set number of times it is accessed.
• We always had enough storage on our Synology DiskStation, we never had to worry about something being too big to upload or share.
• Love how you can create folders that are shared and also have some that are private. This makes it so easy to have shared collaborations with coworkers or clients, but also allows you to have a private place to save things that only you need.

Incentivized

• Backups have the option of "screenshot verification". Screenshot verification doesn't always work for us when our vmtools is out of date. If we are on an older version of VMware and that version of vmtools is up to date, NAKIVO still thinks it is out of date.

Incentivized

• While BTRFS is a more advanced file system than ext4, it also is in a perpetual state of development, with many features not fully functional and a plethora of bugs. Synology has managed to overcome many of these limitations by placing BTRFS on top of a LVM, but there are much better file systems that Synology could have used, such as OpenZFS.
• DSM's built-in backup software, HyperBackup, while robust, oftentimes runs into issues. Specifically, backups can be working fine for months or years, and then suddenly the backups will fail. Sometimes these failures can be resolved, but oftentimes the backups need to be completely restarted. Fortunately, even when the backup fails, the existing backups are still accessible, it is just that new backups can not be performed.
• The underlying Linux OS provides significant benefits, but also adds a fair amount of complexity. Most of that complexity is wonderfully hidden by the DSM interface, but when certain problems arise, delving into the Linux command line is not out of the question.
• Perhaps the biggest issue with Synology DiskStation is Synology's support. The issue isn't that the support is bad, but it can be frustratingly slow when dealing with a major issue. Synology does have a very active community that is always willing to help, but nothing beats first-party support.

Incentivized

It is a product that contains most of the features of its big competitors but at an affordable price for small businesses. In addition, the support is very good even if they only have support in English. Another important factor is its compatibility with NAS devices, which greatly simplifies deployment. The implementation is simple and in a matter of minutes you can define the first copy Jobs

It provides us with great ROI compared with other solutions. It is also a versatile product, having NAS and SAN product lines depending on the business requirement. Furthermore, the implementation of dual controller lines would allow us to consider it for more critical applications to supplement the more enterprise-level SAN solution. It also is a wonderful backup solution, having all the applications available after purchase of the appliance without the further need to purchase additional software or licensing.

Incentivized

NAKIVO Backup & Replication is very easy to set up. I did it by myself, and it went perfectly. Online documents are very well written, and also the tech support asked to help me set it up. I want to do it by myself and the setup process is very easy to do. The connection to your VM and servers is very easy to do.

The Synology DiskStation is fairly easy to use, but maybe a challenge for those who not super IT savvy. With some trial and error, you can pretty much figure out how to configure the NAS the way you want it configured. I would say it is easy to use once it is set up and maintaining the device is likewise pretty straightforward as well.

Incentivized

The support is fast and perfect. If u have any questions, you can contact the support team via mail or chat and you always get a fast answer. You can also find a lot of help in the FAQ in the help center to resolve your problems. Anytime I had to contact the support, they helped me and solved my problem.

Unfortunately, the one time I've had to reach out to DiskStation support, it did not go well. My NAS appliance wasn't appearing on the network, and no matter what the support team tried, they could not get it back online. Instead of offering to send me a new unit, they told me to go buy a new one - obviously, this was a disappointing response and not very eco-friendly either! Fortunately, through some internet research of my own, and some ingenuity, I figured out I could restore my NAS to factory settings by removing all the drives and resetting. Only then did I realize I had a bad disk. I had to experiment for a while to figure out which one it was. Once I had done that, though, I was able to get the latest DiskStation loaded back on, no thanks to the DiskStation support crew. If notifications were rock solid, I suspect I would have caught the bad disk before it because an OS problem, but I never received a bad-disk notification.

Incentivized

It is very easy to do in all the formats in which it is implemented, whether as an appliance, in a windows machine, or an implementation in NAS. I only use the appliance one, but I have tried all of them in trial mode to know which one interested me more.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication stands out as a more cost-effective and robust solution compared to Veeam ONE. With competitive pricing and a comprehensive feature set including incremental backups, global deduplication, LAN-free data transfer, and built-in WAN acceleration, NAKIVO offers efficient data protection and optimized storage usage. Its user-friendly interface and streamlined setup process make it appealing for organizations with limited IT resources. Additionally, NAKIVO's support for VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Nutanix AHV further enhances its versatility. When evaluating data protection solutions, NAKIVO's affordability, robustness, and ease of use make it an attractive choice for businesses seeking a comprehensive and cost-effective backup solution.

Synology DiskStation packs a punch with the latest and greatest feature set which goes above and beyond many other vendors. It allows for a turn-key solution to cover almost every use case in the SMB market leaving other vendors behind.

Incentivized

The pricing for VM backups is good value for money as it does not limit how many VM's per socket. This works well for smaller sites with simple backup requirements. Physical machine backup pricing would more attractive with a sliding scale based on the number of physical machines.

Incentivized

I contacted a few times Nakivo representatives, once for technical doubt and the other ones for commercial ones. Both support services are fast and reliable.

Incentivized

• One of our contributors has permanently deleted worksheets from our file server. From Nakivo, we were able to recover all the data in less than 10 minutes.
• An authentication server was encrypted by ransomware, through NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we recover the entire server within 1 hour.

Incentivized

• It has helped us go from printing things out to file them away to going 100% digital with our files and documents because we have a secure place to save stuff.
• We are organized. I can't really put a value or number to how amazing this is for us, but when we deal with so many documents and files it can be so hard to keep things organized, but with Synology DiskStation, we have all our files in specific places and it helps us stay organized and definitely saves time because things are so easy to find.
• One negative thing has been that our Synology DiskStation relies on us either being plugged into the network in the office or having a strong internet connection at home. With the pandemic and everyone working from home, we have had "outages" where we were not able to sync our data, and things were lost and we had to start over.

Incentivized