Item: Synology Active Backup Suite
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Synology Active Backup Suite

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our organization
currently uses both Active backup and Active backup for Microsoft 365.

Active
backup:
We use
active backup to backup Synology devices on remote sites.To backup a
few physical servers.

Backup an Dev ESXI environment to avoid extra licensing costs with Veeam.

Active backup
for Microsoft 365:All user mailboxes, shared mailboxes, contacts and calendars.

All sharepoint online data and Teams data.

Onedrive data for certain VIPS.

Pros and Cons

Pros

intuitive UI for both managing backups and restore jobs.
Compression and deduplication, to reduce to storage needs and costs.
Easy to install and setup backup agent on windows, linux and of course synology

Cons

For our use case managing multiple public entities, it would be nice to have a breakdown of total storage used by job/task after deduplication/compression.
Restoring of SharePoint online data can only be done to the root of the SharePoint site, it’s possibly a Microsoft limitation not the Synology software.
Updates can be slow for the linux kernel support for the Linux version of the agent, it seems to have gotten better over the past year.

Return on Investment

Cut down on Veeam costs, for non-critical infrastructure.
No monthly or recuring costs due to no subscription or cloud fees
Easy to use and installation, doesn’t require outside consultations or experts to install and setup.

Usability

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.

Alternatives Considered

Veeam Data Platform

Synology is
a great and simple solution to backup physical or virtual infrastructure, it
does what it provides very well.

It’s
lacking a lot of advanced features from the more established solutions on the
market such as Veeam but if budget is an issue you can’t beat the cost and an
all in one solution that can back up your on prem infrastructure and your
Microsoft 365 tenant as well.

Key Insights

Do you think Synology Active Backup Suite delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Synology Active Backup Suite's feature set?

Yes

Did Synology Active Backup Suite live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Synology Active Backup Suite go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Synology Active Backup Suite again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Synology Active Backup Suite Feature Ratings

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Synology Active Backup Suite: Features, Benefits, and Limitations