解放你的双手Free Your Hands

This post is about my impressions after a month and more of using a Synology NAS. That said, the title would honestly work for any electronic product, heated toilet seats included…

First, a word on what a NAS is. To start with, you can think of it as a hard drive connected to the internet: any authorized device can read and write what’s on it. Then, depending on the manufacturer, this hard drive gets granted all sorts of extra powers, like automatically downloading things from all over for you, automatically making backups, or converting your camera’s raw files into a viewable format. Based on my own use, let me highlight a few features: 1. Backing up your data. Data redundancy and all that is beyond me, and Synology never meant for me to understand it. It offers an SHR mode: when the NAS is built out of two hard drives, it automatically makes one drive the backup of the other. That way, as long as the two drives don’t die at the same time, the data won’t be lost. Synology also offers automatic syncing with cloud drives: pick one or several, and the files on the drive and in the cloud stay in sync at all times. In plain human speech, it automatically backs your files up one more time onto the cloud drive of your choice. Within China, Baidu Cloud is supported. The interface is as pictured. No agenda here, just showing you what it looks like. With this, short of deleting something by mistake yourself, it’s actually quite hard to lose a file anymore. In real-world testing the sync is pretty brisk too; I never hit a case where local data changed but the cloud drive didn’t update (I set up one-way sync, so I don’t know what logic Synology follows when two-way sync runs into a conflict) 2. A sync drive of your own. Synology provides a package called Cloud Station. Set up the target folders on your computer/mobile devices and the folder on the Synology, and it toils away tirelessly, keeping the files on your devices in constant two-way sync with the Synology. If that were all it did, well, so be it, buuut Synology also offers rollback across 32 historical versions, which for office folk like me is nothing short of a godsend. Mom never has to worry about me losing an old version again TAT 3. A web photo album of your own. Let me focus on how this so-called album of your own differs from uploading photos to Baidu Cloud and the like.

• This thing backs up automatically. Buy a card reader and plug it into the NAS; when you get home from a trip, stick the card into the reader. Without a word it creates a new folder for you and starts backing up; pull the card the next day, and the photo backup is done. As for phone photos, install DS photo, and the moment it notices you’re on your home WiFi it starts backing up…
• This thing transcodes automatically. Yes, you read that right! From now on you can shoot and use the shots straight away, no more RAW+JPG! At last, no more hunting everywhere for a cracked ACDSee! And when you really do need to edit… just share the NAS drive, drag the file out and it’s still the original, and the whole operation is silky smooth.

Everything above is just features, things most NAS boxes can manage. To me, Synology’s real core competitiveness is that it makes these features genuinely nice to use. Trust me, between usable and nice to use lie a good ten thousand Pacific Oceans. So by the usual playbook I should now explain exactly how nice it is. But I won’t (deadpan face                      I’m done writing.