Synology Hyper Backup Tutorial

Probably one of the most important software applications, but oft neglected, is the backup program. If your data has value to you, making regular backups is a necessity. That practice is not, in itself, sufficient, to protect your data. You actually need to test the backups to make sure they work.

NAS drives often hold the most important data. They are famed for providing hardware RAID. Redundant array of independent disks or as it is better known — RAID — is a data storage virtualization technology that conflates multiple physical storage devices into a single logical unit.

While RAID offers redundancy and therefore a layer of protection that a single hard disk doesn’t provide, RAID never represents a backup solution irrespective of the type of RAID setup chosen. At best, RAID can serve as an auxiliary to a backup strategy.

This article looks at Hyper Backup, software which helps protect shared folder data, packages, as well as Logical Unit Numbers (LUNs). A LUN is a slice or portion of a configured set of disks that is presentable to a host and mounted as a volume within the operating system.

Hyper Backup is software included with Synology’s DiskStation Manager, a Linux-based operating system that runs exclusively on their NAS devices.

Hyper Backup is tested with a Synology DS1517+ NAS, a 5-bay NAS drive, provided by Synology. We’ll also be using the NAS drive to help evaluate a wide range of open source Linux backup software in a forthcoming series.

By default, Hyper Backup is not installed automatically by DSM. Visit DSM’s Package Center where it can be installed with a single click. The package manager will also install PHP 7.4, software it relies upon.

The first thing we’ll take you through is creating a backup task.

Next page: Page 2 – Create a Backup Task

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction
Page 2 – Create a Backup Task
Page 3 – Backup Explorer and Backup Integrity
Page 4 – Restoring Data

All articles in this series: