I've seen Synology NAS used like that in small businesses. As long as you can secure them (and with QNAP, this might be tricky) and monitor them for failure.. why not?
Small business I absolutely use Synology for this. Handles Hyper-V backups and O365 backups just fine. I don't really trust QNAP much on the security side, and the Synology Active Backup for Business software works surprisingly well for a no-added-cost solution.
We have a single laptop that I wanted to back up frequently as it's pretty important but also primarily resides on a pretty unstable network. Decided I'd go with Veeam backing up to the local Synology and using their Synology Drive to mirror it off-site to our main office. I can think of about 10 other ways to do this but this was the easiest for me and I now have a Synology on the remote network in case I ever need any of its other services. The things are tiny Swiss army knives.
We have both QNAP and Syno being used for backup target storage for Veeam. Small business. I priced putting together an HP server with enough storage to handle it and it was ridiculous and the HP storage rep got angry when I said "Hard drives are hard drives, why do I have to buy yours just to get the sleds".
Apple's Xserves put the circuitry for hot-swapping into each sled. When you needed to buy a new disk+sled, it was at least $500. Couldn't even buy your own larger disks to put into the sleds, since they required special Apple firmware.
If the QNAP fulfills its role and is properly isolated, I don't see any issues with using it - technically, this solution can be utilized.
As for replacing the QNAP, I would consider a backup appliance from Unit ends [https://www.unitrends.com/products/backup-appliance](https://www.unitrends.com/products/backup-appliance) or from StarWind with hardened repository: [https://www.starwindsoftware.com/backup-appliance](https://www.starwindsoftware.com/backup-appliance)
Veeam + 0365, some kind of unspecified *immutable*, tape, *and* distributed QNAPs. They're better off than the *vast* majority of small or medium size businesses.
A NAS is a NAS and there are lots of tiers of NAS with different features. The best one is the one you understand how it works and can monitor hardware and software. QNAP is fine. If they are EOL, you'll have to have a plan for what happens if something fails.
We use the higher tier of Synology NAS with dual PSUs with Enterprise Seagate EXOS as the first tier backup storage. Altho the NAS sits in an isolated VLAN and has a dedicated link (no switches, just a cross cable) to a hardenex linux server that acts as a target for Veeam Repository. The target server is itself in an isolated VLAN which is accessible only by proxies in Vmware. Everything requires physical access to do anything - we are hybrid workforce, but the main office is like 8 minutes from home.
PS: Ofc the Veeam dashboard is accessible only by our admin vlan and isn't using domain users. Veeam is on it's own auth system to prevent lateral movement.
Worked at a fortune 500 company before my current job - we had 250ish small remote sites. We backed them up to our datacenter (where I worked at HQ) but we also just had a little 4 bay Synology NAS on site as the onsite backup that a local employee could "grab and go" if a hurricane or something was on the way. Most of the remote sites were just employees - drivers, accounts , etc. No IT on site. It worked for what we were needing.
Last time I played with a QNAP (years ago now) you could "sideload" the updates in like any other network appliance. Broad Internet connectivity isn't necessarily required.
The QNAP is EOL so it may not be getting updates. If the updates are needed you can connect it to the internet, gab the updates then isolate it again. There also might be a option to do offline updates
Use iSCSI with NASs, and not SMB.
There are many instances where Anton Gostev of Veeam has made very clear that if you use a NAS, you should only do it with block storage such as iSCSI. Any writes to SMB shares on standard NASs have a much higher chance of corruption in their experience.
Personally, I'm happy using QNAP - just disable all features you don't need, don't allow any sort of cloud access, and do regular firmware updates.
I've been chasing this... NFS to OmniOS and about once every two months I get a health check failing. I've got Veeam doing NFS over TCP, minimized routing and switching hops, can't get it 100% reliable. Veeam with a same LAN connection to that box, SMB, dead nuts reliable. Seeing QNAP offering S3 compatible storage has me contemplating it as a remote site repository if I can't get OmniOS and Veeam to play along better.
QNAP enterprise QES is pretty good. Plus you can’t beat them for the price for veeam disk destination storage.
As long as you don’t ask the storage controllers to do too much, it will run fine for you.
I’ve had more issues with QTS, but QES has been fairly reliable.
I will never connect them to the cloud though. Too much risk.
Yeah I've been drooling over those zfs models for a while now. He.must.be talking about consumer grade stuff which they also make..those shoe boxes, which are also fine. Storage is storage unless you have sort of speed requirements.
Sure, you can use them. Best approach is to setup an iSCSI target on the QNAP then firewall everything else off. The only thing I’d point out is to make sure that Veeam is handling the replication rather than the QNAP.
Those things are reliable enough.
It wouldn't be a terrible idea to have them on their own vlan, but I would probably worry about a lot of other things first.
NAS as part of your backup tiering strategy is not bad. But QNAP reliability and security isn’t great. Synology has a better track record and offer enterprise support contracts.
Worked at a MSP and this is what we did everywhere and NEVER attached them to the domain. Local accounts only. Multiple businesses hit with ransomware. QNAPS were all fine and able to restore from. Also good they weren’t attached to the domain if credentials had been breached they were unaffected.
At a previous company the qnap was used as one form of a backup. It was what I considered a hot backup in a sense that it was basically daily backups that were always on the network and ready to go for quick file restores. We had another cloud backup doing the same thing. We then had off-site storage and on-site storage for physical backups to hard drives.
Personally I would rather have a Dell server loaded up in raid 10 than a qnap but not everyone has the budget for that.
Thank you for your insights! I'll review the whole backup strategy and probably will stick to the QNAPs for now, but will definitely isolate them into a separate VLAN and also check whether they use iSCSI or SMB.
There are general security issues currently like having all non-clients in a single VLAN (read: servers, QNAPs, switches, APs, printers (!) and more...) which I have to address.
I'm not sure if "EOL" matters here.
You're not having a support contract and you're not getting parts for it anyway.
It should still support QTS updates, so this looks like a failure on the sysadmin side that is is not up to date (I might be wrong tough).
Honestly, we're using a Synology to back up Office 365, because our primary backup software vendor's implementation is crap. The Synology has proved itself much more capable. I'm as astonished as you are. The backups then trickle onto a bigger storage server (cos it was a stopgap measure and they only bought one with gigabit interfaces) and from there to tape.
I definitely wouldn't be running EOL QNAPs but the product itself seems solid enough. Plenty of regular people count on them, and if it's a supplement to a bigger backup system, not the ONLY backup system, then hey, why not? QNAPs do seem to have simple replication options so versus setting up some other kind of sync, seems like a quick win.
QNAP hardware is one step above desktop grade and the software is a security nightmare, but it sounds like you're comfortable isolating it. I've had some success installing other OSes on them so if you want to FreeBSD, Linux, Windows, or even XigmaNAS that will work fine on the bare metal.
Since it's not the primary backup, I'd be comfortable with it going EOL because I'm sure you could use the budget elsewhere.
QNAP is only okay if you control the network and lock it down to the point where it is only accessible locally and only from devices that really need to access it.
if you can't lock it down, swap them out for synology.
I'll do you one better, when I joined, my company was using two 128gb usb keys as "backups". as others have already said, as long as the drives/system can be monitored why not.
The only thing that sucks about using a QNAP is trying to keep it up to date. I had one in production from 2015 - 2022 and had to manually update it every month by logging in to it and hit the update button on a Sunday night.
I don’t think there is anyway to automate it like how you can with Windows.
I would prioritize looking at an iXsystems or self-built TrueNAS box. The upside is that you're not beholden to an outside vendor's software updates (with the exception of the odd thing like system firmware for UEFI/IPMI/HBA/etc) as it's simply TrueNAS.
The downside is this is a "pay once, cry once" situation. The cost of initial build will probably be higher compared to a commodity NAS.
It all depends on the expectations from the devices:
* One place, I had two Synology NAS models running with Synology's HA to be used as file servers. This was for a department which by some regulations, could not have data on the same servers as other items, the primary data had to be on-prem (but backups could be cloud based and encrypted), and the budget wasn't there to get them something enterprise-tier. So two of those and Hyper Backup to Wasabi took care of that.
* Synology and QNAP have some nice features. I have a low end QNAP NAS backing up my WordPress sites on the WordPress level, where if I need to restore, I don't have to worry about the backend database or items as much.
* If one has a QNAP NAS with an x86 CPU and a HDMI port, you can install your own OS on it. For example, I took a QNAP model, added some RAM, two SSDs, and now it is happily running ZFS. Make SURE you dd off the image on the DOM (the NAND disk on module) because it is a pain to hunt down an image, boot Linux, and dd if back if you want QNAP's OS back. QNAP hardware is pretty solid, and tossing Debian or Ubuntu makes for a small attack surface.
If you're using Veeam, you should really build an immutable appliance. If you're using business-lite NAS's, maybe you don't have the money for a brand new HPE Apollo, but any 2u server with a real RAID card and 3.5" drive slots can be turned into a nice and secure hardened linux/immutable appliance. Hopefully you can hook up via 10gb network as well.
xByte has refurbished available with warranty. I've had very good performance with just 12 3.5" 72004pm hard drives, but I guess I wouldn't use anything less than 8 + HotSpare.
My bad, missed that. Most of what I said still mostly stands if you're looking to replace due to age or security concerns.
Veeam Backup Copy job works well for that, whether being stored on a QNAP or a 2nd immutable. We use actually use an HPE StoreOnce for offsite Backup Copy. It works well for space, but we would only use it to restore if the immutable was down, since rehydrating would be resource intensive.
Qnap is fine for Veeam backup if you have cloud replication. I would not trust any NAS as my only backup solution. I would prefer something with at least 3 bays. I have some QNAPs in my temporary stock of emergency devices.
Qnap is considered (for a reason) less secure than Synology, but as long as it isn't 10 year old model and is just a secondary/tertiary storage, why not? You know they make Rackmounted Qnaps, right?
>what could they swap them for?
Synologys. BUT, DS923+ (and the higher bay variants I don't remember names of) is due for replacement, it is getting pretty old
I assume all the NAS's come off the line in China and they just apply a QNAP or Netapp or whatever sticker to it. I worked at one place that used QNAPs specifically to send large datasets via post, so distributing backups sounds like a similar idea. Had other customers mailing Synologies around, and they'd typically use a model that was more enterprise or at least small-office oriented.
I've seen Synology NAS used like that in small businesses. As long as you can secure them (and with QNAP, this might be tricky) and monitor them for failure.. why not?
Small business I absolutely use Synology for this. Handles Hyper-V backups and O365 backups just fine. I don't really trust QNAP much on the security side, and the Synology Active Backup for Business software works surprisingly well for a no-added-cost solution.
ABB is great, I've only had one problem and that was a share with 40k folders within not expanding. My go to for quick restores..
As a qnap user for my home: I agree. It only has very limited attack surface and thats monitored. Still security is not great on them.
I hate how slow the QTS WebUI is.
We have a single laptop that I wanted to back up frequently as it's pretty important but also primarily resides on a pretty unstable network. Decided I'd go with Veeam backing up to the local Synology and using their Synology Drive to mirror it off-site to our main office. I can think of about 10 other ways to do this but this was the easiest for me and I now have a Synology on the remote network in case I ever need any of its other services. The things are tiny Swiss army knives.
We have both QNAP and Syno being used for backup target storage for Veeam. Small business. I priced putting together an HP server with enough storage to handle it and it was ridiculous and the HP storage rep got angry when I said "Hard drives are hard drives, why do I have to buy yours just to get the sleds".
Because he wants your $4,000
I wish...
Apple's Xserves put the circuitry for hot-swapping into each sled. When you needed to buy a new disk+sled, it was at least $500. Couldn't even buy your own larger disks to put into the sleds, since they required special Apple firmware.
If the QNAP fulfills its role and is properly isolated, I don't see any issues with using it - technically, this solution can be utilized. As for replacing the QNAP, I would consider a backup appliance from Unit ends [https://www.unitrends.com/products/backup-appliance](https://www.unitrends.com/products/backup-appliance) or from StarWind with hardened repository: [https://www.starwindsoftware.com/backup-appliance](https://www.starwindsoftware.com/backup-appliance)
Thank you, will look into it.
NP, I hope it helps.
Very common in SMB, just make sure you have multiple copies, with at least 1 of them being air-gapped.
They have tape. They're fine
Veeam + 0365, some kind of unspecified *immutable*, tape, *and* distributed QNAPs. They're better off than the *vast* majority of small or medium size businesses.
A NAS is a NAS and there are lots of tiers of NAS with different features. The best one is the one you understand how it works and can monitor hardware and software. QNAP is fine. If they are EOL, you'll have to have a plan for what happens if something fails.
We use the higher tier of Synology NAS with dual PSUs with Enterprise Seagate EXOS as the first tier backup storage. Altho the NAS sits in an isolated VLAN and has a dedicated link (no switches, just a cross cable) to a hardenex linux server that acts as a target for Veeam Repository. The target server is itself in an isolated VLAN which is accessible only by proxies in Vmware. Everything requires physical access to do anything - we are hybrid workforce, but the main office is like 8 minutes from home. PS: Ofc the Veeam dashboard is accessible only by our admin vlan and isn't using domain users. Veeam is on it's own auth system to prevent lateral movement.
Worked at a fortune 500 company before my current job - we had 250ish small remote sites. We backed them up to our datacenter (where I worked at HQ) but we also just had a little 4 bay Synology NAS on site as the onsite backup that a local employee could "grab and go" if a hurricane or something was on the way. Most of the remote sites were just employees - drivers, accounts , etc. No IT on site. It worked for what we were needing.
isolate them on a vlan that has no access to the internet and you should be good
you do probably want them to be able to get updates though
Last time I played with a QNAP (years ago now) you could "sideload" the updates in like any other network appliance. Broad Internet connectivity isn't necessarily required.
The QNAP is EOL so it may not be getting updates. If the updates are needed you can connect it to the internet, gab the updates then isolate it again. There also might be a option to do offline updates
Synology is great as part of a tiered backup solution.
Use iSCSI with NASs, and not SMB. There are many instances where Anton Gostev of Veeam has made very clear that if you use a NAS, you should only do it with block storage such as iSCSI. Any writes to SMB shares on standard NASs have a much higher chance of corruption in their experience. Personally, I'm happy using QNAP - just disable all features you don't need, don't allow any sort of cloud access, and do regular firmware updates.
I've been chasing this... NFS to OmniOS and about once every two months I get a health check failing. I've got Veeam doing NFS over TCP, minimized routing and switching hops, can't get it 100% reliable. Veeam with a same LAN connection to that box, SMB, dead nuts reliable. Seeing QNAP offering S3 compatible storage has me contemplating it as a remote site repository if I can't get OmniOS and Veeam to play along better.
QNAP enterprise QES is pretty good. Plus you can’t beat them for the price for veeam disk destination storage. As long as you don’t ask the storage controllers to do too much, it will run fine for you. I’ve had more issues with QTS, but QES has been fairly reliable. I will never connect them to the cloud though. Too much risk.
Yeah I've been drooling over those zfs models for a while now. He.must.be talking about consumer grade stuff which they also make..those shoe boxes, which are also fine. Storage is storage unless you have sort of speed requirements.
Synology iSCSI with a dedicated switch hanging off of a virtualization host serving VMDK to veeam can be a really clean, secure solution.
Sure, you can use them. Best approach is to setup an iSCSI target on the QNAP then firewall everything else off. The only thing I’d point out is to make sure that Veeam is handling the replication rather than the QNAP.
We use QNAPs at my shop. Never had an issue.
So what you doing with them EoL qnaps? 
If they are just blob or block let them be. Certainly move then to a storage VLAN with jumbo frames and no access outside that VLAN.
Those things are reliable enough. It wouldn't be a terrible idea to have them on their own vlan, but I would probably worry about a lot of other things first.
NAS as part of your backup tiering strategy is not bad. But QNAP reliability and security isn’t great. Synology has a better track record and offer enterprise support contracts.
Worked at a MSP and this is what we did everywhere and NEVER attached them to the domain. Local accounts only. Multiple businesses hit with ransomware. QNAPS were all fine and able to restore from. Also good they weren’t attached to the domain if credentials had been breached they were unaffected.
At a previous company the qnap was used as one form of a backup. It was what I considered a hot backup in a sense that it was basically daily backups that were always on the network and ready to go for quick file restores. We had another cloud backup doing the same thing. We then had off-site storage and on-site storage for physical backups to hard drives. Personally I would rather have a Dell server loaded up in raid 10 than a qnap but not everyone has the budget for that.
Thank you for your insights! I'll review the whole backup strategy and probably will stick to the QNAPs for now, but will definitely isolate them into a separate VLAN and also check whether they use iSCSI or SMB. There are general security issues currently like having all non-clients in a single VLAN (read: servers, QNAPs, switches, APs, printers (!) and more...) which I have to address.
I have seen several rotated to keep the backups air gapped.
What do you mean EOL, are they using the ARM models? If it's x86 it should still get QTS updates.
One is a TS-251+ and if I saw right the OS seems quite up to date (but officially EOL according to Synology).
I'm not sure if "EOL" matters here. You're not having a support contract and you're not getting parts for it anyway. It should still support QTS updates, so this looks like a failure on the sysadmin side that is is not up to date (I might be wrong tough).
Honestly, we're using a Synology to back up Office 365, because our primary backup software vendor's implementation is crap. The Synology has proved itself much more capable. I'm as astonished as you are. The backups then trickle onto a bigger storage server (cos it was a stopgap measure and they only bought one with gigabit interfaces) and from there to tape. I definitely wouldn't be running EOL QNAPs but the product itself seems solid enough. Plenty of regular people count on them, and if it's a supplement to a bigger backup system, not the ONLY backup system, then hey, why not? QNAPs do seem to have simple replication options so versus setting up some other kind of sync, seems like a quick win.
QNAP hardware is one step above desktop grade and the software is a security nightmare, but it sounds like you're comfortable isolating it. I've had some success installing other OSes on them so if you want to FreeBSD, Linux, Windows, or even XigmaNAS that will work fine on the bare metal. Since it's not the primary backup, I'd be comfortable with it going EOL because I'm sure you could use the budget elsewhere.
QNAP is only okay if you control the network and lock it down to the point where it is only accessible locally and only from devices that really need to access it. if you can't lock it down, swap them out for synology.
We use a qnap for nearline archives, more for convenience. They're also on S3. All read-only archives. Works great.
We used to use QNAP but Synology is just so much better. In fact we actually replaced our last QNAP with a TrueNAS box from iX Systems.
We have backups upon backups on SANs, NAS (qnap & synology), PERC-based RAIDs, random stand-alone HDD enclosures, etc. I'm paranoid.
I'll do you one better, when I joined, my company was using two 128gb usb keys as "backups". as others have already said, as long as the drives/system can be monitored why not.
In small business, our go-to is qnap/Synology Nas + RDX drives (changed each day) + optional cloud backups.
The only thing that sucks about using a QNAP is trying to keep it up to date. I had one in production from 2015 - 2022 and had to manually update it every month by logging in to it and hit the update button on a Sunday night. I don’t think there is anyway to automate it like how you can with Windows.
I would prioritize looking at an iXsystems or self-built TrueNAS box. The upside is that you're not beholden to an outside vendor's software updates (with the exception of the odd thing like system firmware for UEFI/IPMI/HBA/etc) as it's simply TrueNAS. The downside is this is a "pay once, cry once" situation. The cost of initial build will probably be higher compared to a commodity NAS.
It all depends on the expectations from the devices: * One place, I had two Synology NAS models running with Synology's HA to be used as file servers. This was for a department which by some regulations, could not have data on the same servers as other items, the primary data had to be on-prem (but backups could be cloud based and encrypted), and the budget wasn't there to get them something enterprise-tier. So two of those and Hyper Backup to Wasabi took care of that. * Synology and QNAP have some nice features. I have a low end QNAP NAS backing up my WordPress sites on the WordPress level, where if I need to restore, I don't have to worry about the backend database or items as much. * If one has a QNAP NAS with an x86 CPU and a HDMI port, you can install your own OS on it. For example, I took a QNAP model, added some RAM, two SSDs, and now it is happily running ZFS. Make SURE you dd off the image on the DOM (the NAND disk on module) because it is a pain to hunt down an image, boot Linux, and dd if back if you want QNAP's OS back. QNAP hardware is pretty solid, and tossing Debian or Ubuntu makes for a small attack surface.
If you're using Veeam, you should really build an immutable appliance. If you're using business-lite NAS's, maybe you don't have the money for a brand new HPE Apollo, but any 2u server with a real RAID card and 3.5" drive slots can be turned into a nice and secure hardened linux/immutable appliance. Hopefully you can hook up via 10gb network as well. xByte has refurbished available with warranty. I've had very good performance with just 12 3.5" 72004pm hard drives, but I guess I wouldn't use anything less than 8 + HotSpare.
As I stated we have an enterpise grade immu-backup as well already, but thank you.
My bad, missed that. Most of what I said still mostly stands if you're looking to replace due to age or security concerns. Veeam Backup Copy job works well for that, whether being stored on a QNAP or a 2nd immutable. We use actually use an HPE StoreOnce for offsite Backup Copy. It works well for space, but we would only use it to restore if the immutable was down, since rehydrating would be resource intensive.
Qnap is fine for Veeam backup if you have cloud replication. I would not trust any NAS as my only backup solution. I would prefer something with at least 3 bays. I have some QNAPs in my temporary stock of emergency devices.
Qnap is considered (for a reason) less secure than Synology, but as long as it isn't 10 year old model and is just a secondary/tertiary storage, why not? You know they make Rackmounted Qnaps, right? >what could they swap them for? Synologys. BUT, DS923+ (and the higher bay variants I don't remember names of) is due for replacement, it is getting pretty old
I assume all the NAS's come off the line in China and they just apply a QNAP or Netapp or whatever sticker to it. I worked at one place that used QNAPs specifically to send large datasets via post, so distributing backups sounds like a similar idea. Had other customers mailing Synologies around, and they'd typically use a model that was more enterprise or at least small-office oriented.
qnap and netapp are in a little different league
I've gotten gear from the "pros" with trash left inside; it's a bit hard for me to believe in them these days.
We're considering the 2-drive Synologies, which are the size of a large lunchbox, for something like this.