Synology BeeStation Review: A Great Way to Get Started with Real Backups

Dropbox is not a backup. A portable hard drive is not a backup. I have been told by experienced people that a real backup starts with 3-2-1 ruleThree copies, two types of storage (or devices), and one remote copy.

However, my data backup system is still a bit of a slog. I’ve tried a variety of plans, from “pay for space on Google Drive and then dump it all there” to “a cross-platform rsync/crontab system with no UI that I’m trying to build with StackExchange.” I try not to be the guy who insists in a commercial that there must be a better way, but when it comes to backing up music, photos, email, files, settings to the cloud, I am. There is he have It’s a better way, and it can’t just be a Synology NAS setup, right?

Well, what if Synology itself knew that not everyone was ready to become a freelance admin running a private system? That’s how I think. Bee station ($220 at the time of writing.) It’s enough backup to be a lot better than most people think backup is (hopefully a giant corporation never loses or shuts down its accounts), but it’s still just one device. It can also create a seamless step up to a full-fledged NAS if this little flavor of self-directed storage is what you’re looking for.

The basic idea Synology is that you can use BeeStation on your “personal cloud journey,” sorting objects and recognizing faces using machine learning for synced, curated photos and files to work with. At that level, I’m not a fan of the service, though some people may appreciate these self-hosted alternatives to Drive, Dropbox, Google Photos, and iCloud more than I do. It’s certainly a good way to get more out of your backups.

The best feature of the BeeStation is that it automates good backup habits. Within two weeks of setting it up, I had my wife’s and my own Drive and Dropbox accounts synced and backed up regularly; stored old music, movies, and miscellaneous files; and regularly backed up our photos from our phones. All of this was then backed up to Synology’s cloud servers every week (for an additional cost), and everything was available remotely and on the local network.

hardware

If you’ve ever owned a hard drive that sits inside a powered external case, you’ve probably owned something similar to the BeeStation. It’s a black plastic box, with a cable or two attached to it, that sits there and occasionally makes some noise when it’s turned or accessed.

But the device doesn’t make a lot of noise, unless you’re doing a lot of backups or using it as a Dropbox replacement to work on files all day. The BeeStation’s interior is packed with heatsinks, passive cooling systems, and vibration dampeners, and the design work pays off. Compared to the two-bay (non-Synology) NAS system the BeeStation runs alongside, the BeeStation was relatively quiet.

Without the full three-year warranty, I can only speak to how little I noticed this device during its few months in my office. The bee-themed Synology branding is subtle, with just a quarter-sized logo on each size. There’s a power light on the front to let you know it’s working, and the plugs are on the back. The USB-A and USB-C ports are right next to each other, so if you’re using a particularly bulky USB drive or a cable head for either, you may need to invest in adapters or short extension cables.

As for performance, that’s not what this device is all about. The Realtek chip inside won’t run Plex, a torrent downloader, or anything like that (and the OS doesn’t support it). When I handed it a fully compressed 140GB Google Photos file to import into BeePhotos, it took a full weekend for the system to unzip, parse, and put it in place. Transferring files from a USB4 stick was as quick as I could have imagined; while I’m sure the 1GB of memory is a bottleneck, I only do this a few times a year. As with any other backup plan, you should only need to sync new and changed files once the collection is in place.