Synology NAS for web access

paulpud

We currently have a 9 year old Buffalo Linkstation NAS in our office that has always performed perfectly well within our small hard wired network but web access has always been troublesome. I have had it working on occasions but at best it's sketchy and more often than not it's been pretty hopeless, so I've decided to go for an upgrade so that I can do more work at home and use the internet to access our files.

Having spent a while looking around I've read good things about Synology NAS devices - does anyone have any experience of these and is web access easy/reliable?

AndyPix

Yes - synology are great NAS boxes - combined with WD RED drives ..


Web access is easy and is as reliable as your web connection

CardinalWolsey

Another nod to Synology. Mine acts as a straight file server, as well as a Plex server, and DHCP. Works perfectly both inside and outside my home network. I also back mine up to a connected USB hard-drive, and have toyed with it also backing up to the cloud - all possible.

tafelmoneysaver

If you don't already have additional security setup then I'd recommend ping all of these to protect your NAS on the public internet.

https://www.synology.com/en-uk/knowledgebase/DSM/tutorial/General/How_to_add_extra_security_to_your_Synology_NAS

Synology also have a product called Cloudstation which I use as an equivalent to Dropbox/OneDrive so I've got local copies of files on laptops and syncs when back on the LAN.

paulpud

Excellent, I think I'm going to go down this route then.

I have read about the direct cloud back up and this would be a bonus - I do back up to cloud periodically which I do manually during working hours at present and it is a pain in the bum

tafelmoneysaver

Your other option is of course to ditch all your on premise equipment and migrate it all into Office365 or Google Apps and get rid of all your hardware problems, by that wasn't in scope of your original question ��

paulpud

Our office is still a little old fashioned and my boss isn't the most tech savvy person out there, I think he'd have kittens if I did away with the hardware!

CardinalWolsey

Depends upon the types of files you use as to whether you should go full cloud, and importantly - the size of those files (e.g. office files that can live in, and be edited in, directly in the cloud, or whether you are having to continuously sync them between workstation and cloud; that's when the size comes in to play, because you can soak up a lot of bandwidth with larger files).

Also, unless you invest in the network infrastructure to give you redundancy to the cloud, you would have a single point of failure - your internet connection.

For me, [public] cloud is another tool in the toolkit, but you still need the toolkit. Private cloud, which is what the Synology would give the OP, is a lot better step forward. But make sure within a pro-environment you specify the right size box, with the right type of RAID, and that you have the right onsite/offsite backup policy in place.