Scott Hanselman

NOTE: This article has been upgraded for Synology systems that are running DSM 5.0!

At home I use a Synology 1511+ NAS (Network Attached Storage) server for all my family's digital things. The Synology gives me virtually all the features I had when I was in love with the Windows Home Server. I can add a drive of any size and get more storage, I can install add-in packages for more functionality, and most importantly, everything has multiple copies. I've even lost a whole drive and just repaired it by pulling it out and replacing it.

I have four 2TB drives in my Synology giving me approximately 5TB of redundant space.

However, the lack of a good integrated cloud storage setup has been a frustration. The Synology does support Amazon S3 as a remote backup location, but I find the opacity of my digital blobs in Amazon's S3 buckets systems frustrating. S3 is great, but it's not an awesome cloud backup experience like some of the more consumer focused backup systems like CrashPlan* or BackBlaze. Sure, these guys might use S3 underneath, but as a consumer (or pro-sumer) I don't need to know or see that.

Here's my current Backup Strategy. There are also non-cloud-based backup strategies if you don't have persistent fast internet. You can see how my strategy has changed since my 2007 Backup Strategy, but not much.

Any good backup strategy follows the Backup Rule of Three.

• 3 copies of anything you care about - Two isn't enough if it's important.
• 2 different formats - Example: Dropbox+DVDs or Hard Drive+Memory Stick or CD+Crash Plan, or more
• 1 off-site backup - If the house burns down, how will you get your memories back?

More importantly a good backup strategy "Just Works" and Doesn't Require Much Thought. If you have to think about it, it is likely to be forgotten. Everything should be automated. I like that DropBox is automatic, the Synology can backup to another external automatically, so I only have to think about rotating drives off-site every month, or at least a few times a year.

The missing piece since I got the Synology has been a completely silent cloud archive. Running CrashPlan headless (headless - there is no monitor) has been the final piece I needed for a simple process that requires no effort on my part.

Step by Step: How to run CrashPlan on your Synology NAS

This gentleman at PCLoadLetter has prepared excellent packages that make it MUCH easier than before to get CrashPlan running on your Synology. However, his instructions assume a some technical ability and also require reading a LOT and visiting several pages within his site. It took me about an hour to really understand what was being said. Here's my simplified version of How To get CrashPlan* on your Synology.

1. Turn on the "User Homes Service" on your Synology

Log in to your Synology from a web browser. Mine is http://server. Go to the Control Panel, then User, then User Home and click "Enable User Home Service." This will give the future "crashplan" user a "place to live."

2. Ensure you have a share called "public" with full for users access

Later when we run the CrashPlan package, it will expect the Java package to live in \\yourserver\public. Make sure you have a public share. I choose also to hide mine since I'll never use it and don't want to confuse my other users.

3. Download the right version of Java for your CPU from the Oracle Website

CrashPlan is written using the Java environment, and we want to install the CrashPlan service on our Synology. We'll need Java for that.

A Synology is effectively a headless custom Linux computer. Some have an Intel chip and some have an ARM chip. You should find out which CPU/chip your Synology has from this table, and remember it. We need to get the right version of Java for our CPU.

If you have an Intel CPU, you'll get Java 6. If you have an ARM CPU you can get Java 7. You download Oracle Java Embedded from the Oracle Website yourself. Note that you'll have to Register for an Account and Sign in. You'll also need to click "Accept License Agreement" to download it. There's a LOT of choices and it's confusing.

If you get it wrong, don't worry. Later, when you try to install the CrashPlan package you'll get a warning if Java isn't there and that warning will give you the right file name. For Intel, I needed "x86 Linux Small Footprint – Headless."

Download this file and copy it to \\yourserver\public.

4. Add http://packages.pcloadletter.co.uk as a new repository in the Synology Package Manager

Back on your Synology, from the web browser, go to the Package Center, then Settings, then Package Sources. Add http://packages.pcloadletter.co.uk as a new repository. I named it "PC Load Letter" but it doesn't matter.

5. Install the CrashPlan package on your Synology. Stop it and restart it.

Staying in the Package Manager, go to Other Sources.

You'll need the Java Package and the CrashPlan package.

You need to install the Java Package first and it will pull from binaries from the \\yourserver\public  folder. It doesn't need to be "started" as it's really a software package disguised as a service. It's OK that its Status is Stopped.

Next, install the CrashPlan service if you have a basic CrashPlan+ account like I do. There are other packages for Pro and Business.

After the service installs and runs you can click More then Log and see if it started correctly. You'll need to stop and restart manually it at least once when you've FIRST installed it.

Now, you've got a headless service waiting and running on your Synology. But you'll notice there is no UI, no settings and no way to configure it. That's where the CrashPlan client comes in that you'll run on any regular computer you have.

6. Install the CrashPlan client on one of your main computers.

Go download and install the right CrashPlan client for you. After you've installed it, you'll need to POINT the client to your Synology.

You need to edit the "C:\Program Files\CrashPlan\conf\ui.properties" text file and put in the IP address of your Synology. My Synology is called "SERVER" so I opened a command prompt and typed "ping server" and was told its address is 192.168.1.18.

• NOTE: This is a Linefeeds only Linux text file so you'll want to use Notepad2 or something OTHER than Notepad so you don't corrupt this file. Make a copy.

Remove the # in front of serviceHost to 'uncomment' that line and add your Synology IP address at the end.

• OPTIONAL NOTE: You can turn off the CrashPlan Service on the computer that has the CrashPlan client running if you won't be backing up that machine. Run "services.msc" and change the CrashPlan service to "Manual."

7. How do you know it is working?

Run CrashPlan on your main computer to ensure it's successfully talking to your Synology.

• You should see your Synology's name on the Settings Dialog
• You should see CrashPlan Central in your Destinations if you have a CrashPlan subscription
• You can select your files that exist on the Synology from the CrashPlan application on your main computer. Remember this CrashPlan client talks to the headless service running on your Synology.

The initial backup will likely take a LONG time so be patient - like for days or weeks. I am choosing not to backup super-large files like DVD backups, 60 gig VMs and other things. My #1 concern is family photos and personal files, so my initial backup set is only 200gigs.

You can get CrashPlan+ and do one computer, or get CrashPlan+ Family and do up to 10 computers.

* These are affiliate links to CrashPlan. The link is NOT mine and I'm not personally affiliated with CrashPlan. Instead, clicking them and signing up for CrashPlan will support the nice gentleman at PCLoadLetter.co.uk who put in the hard work of making and maintaining CrashPlan packages and hosting them. By signing up for CrashPlan using his link you help him out a little, as we should, given his fine efforts. Big thanks for PCLoadLetter and the Synology community for all their efforts! I hope my tutorial makes it even easier for folks to get their CrashPlan back-ups setup so cleanly!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I'm ALWAYS pounding people to backup. I will continue. BACKUP YOUR STUFF. If you care about it, back it up.

Let's talk. Yes, I'm talking to you, non-technical friend. You're a writer, a blogger, not a techie. I get that. Can't be bothered, I get that. Very busy. You will be even busier when you lose access to your dropbox, or leave your laptop on a train.

Please. Read. Tell your friends.

These are NOT backups

Here are some things that are NOT backups. Feel free to tweet or Facebook them to shame educate your family.

• Backing up your laptop to an SD Card in the same laptop is #notabackup
• Backing up to a hard drive that is 6 inches away from your computer is #notabackup
• Backing up your Gmail to another Gmail account is #notabackup
• Backing up your book by copying it to another folder is #notabackup
• The photos that are still in your camera memory are #notabackup

Do you have any other good examples?

The Backup Rule of Three

Here's the rule of three. It's a long time computer-person rule of thumb that you can apply to your life now. It's also called the Backup 3-2-1 rule.

• 3 copies of anything you care about - Two isn't enough if it's important.
• 2 different formats - Example: Dropbox+DVDs or Hard Drive+Memory Stick or CD+Crash Plan, or more
• 1 off-site backup - If the house burns down, how will you get your memories back?

Why so paranoid?

Simple. Because I care about my work, photos and data and I would be sad if I lost it.

Think about all the times you've heard about a friend who has lost everything. A decade of photos. Years of email. It hurts-  just like exercise - because it's good for you.

Try restoring from a backup to practice. Backups always succeed. It's restores that fail.

What should I do?

I think at a minimum folks should do this.

• Have TWO physical backups (hard drive, memory card) with a copy of everything, at least weekly. You can automate this.
• Backup everything that has data that matters. That means phones, too.
• Have a cloud backup storage (CrashPlan, DropBox, SkyDrive, something)
• Don't trust the cloud. I backup my gmail, too.
• Rotate the physical backups between your house and somewhere else. I use the safety deposit box. You can use your Mama's house. Just label one "Backup A" and one "Backup B" and when you visit, swap them.

Recommended Reading

Here's some other blog posts on the topic of backup. Now, take action.

• A basic non-cloud-based personal backup strategy
• On Losing Data and a Family Backup Strategy
• Windows 8, Step 0 - Turn on continuous backups via File History
• Automatically Backup your Gmail account on a schedule with GMVault and Windows Task Scheduler
• Give Grandpa and Grandma the gift of an off-site backup of your photos

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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All too often I see programmers trying to solve their problems on the internet by blindly "flipping switches."

Change something, hit refresh in the browser. "Why is that cached? What's going on?" Change something else, hit refresh in the browser. "What's the deal?"

You may have heard the term "cargo cult programming" where islanders after World War II would wave sticks hoping that planes full of supplies would fly over. They drew a conclusion that the sticks waving caused the planes to come.

Think about abstractions. This is a good reminder for the beginner and the long-time expert. This applies not just to computers but to cars, light bulbs, refrigerators and more.

What are you not seeing? Look underneath.

When coding on the web, remember that effectively NOTHING is hidden from you.

A friend emailed with a question about some CSS files not caching. This is a smart guy with a long question about a confusing behavior in the browser. I asked - as I often ask - what's happening underneath? Did you look inside?

Are you using Fiddler? Did you press F12 in your browser of choice and explore their network tools? Are you using WireShark?

Literally this moment, as I am writing this post, I just noticed that the Twitter box on my blog here doesn't have my latest tweet embedded.

I could hit refresh a bunch of times, google around for vague terms, email a friend, or I could look inside.

I hit F12 in my browser. I look at the Network tab, and sort by Status.

Hey, suddenly my Twitter API call is a 404. First, that's lame of them. They should have redirected me, but alas, no one respects the permalink anymore. #getoffmylawn

With this single  insight I am now armed with googleable terms. I do a single search for "twitter user timeline json api" and see at the Twitter Developer Center that they've changed the format to included "api." and a version number.

I change my template to call this changed URL https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline/shanselman.json?callback=twitterCallback2&count=10 instead, and hit Refresh in my browser, once.

There's my tweet. No joke, this just happened. Good timing, I think.

You decide how deep you want to go down the rabbit hole. I am not expecting everyone to be a neurosurgeon or a professional network engineer but I firmly believe that digging just one layer deeper in all things will enhance your life and your work.

Learn basic HTTP debugging and ALWAYS check your result codes. Even if you are a non-technical blogger, learn how to check for 404s and 301s and 500s and assert your assumptions.

The world - and the internet - is not a black box. Look inside.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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So you've installed Windows 8. I'm going to do a small series of posts called "Windows 8, Step 0" with tips on what to be sure to do after you've installed Windows.

Here's an important TODO for you. Do it NOW. Do it all your machines, especially Non Technical Family Member's machine. Take that giant external USB drive you've got lying around and plug it in.

From within the Windows 8 Start Screen, type "File History" then click "Settings"

Click it. Turn on File History and point it to your giant external drive, or some large network share that you have available.

This is kind of like Time Machine on a Mac. It will keep a constant shadow of your files backed up to this other drive. It runs automatically and you don't think about it until you lose something. It will automatically backup anything and everything in your Libraries (including Documents, Photos, Videos, Music) and everything on your Desktop.

If you want to backup more specific stuff, add whatever files you want to your Windows Libraries. I've added photos from another drive, for example as well as Documents from my DropBox folder.

You can click Advanced Settings there on the left to control how long the files are kept, how much disk space is used and how often it happens.

I've also checked the box under HomeGroup to automatically recommend this large drive to the rest of the house! This is awesome for a few reasons. Other machines in the HomeGroup will automatically see this drive and can use it just by clicking "Turn on."

In the screenshot below you can see the File History dialog from my laptop with the 3TB drive from my other machine called HEXPOWER7 being recommended as a good drive for File History. One click, now my files are backed up on this machine.

HomeGroups are groups of computers at home that you trust and want to share files and devices with. You can make a HomeGroup in less than a minute. From the Start Screen, type "HomeGroup" then Click "Settings." Follow the instructions.

If you want, you can click Select Drive and pick any drive on your machine or add a network location. I have a 5TB Synology NAS so I could use that also. Any Windows-compatible SMB/Samba NAS will do.

Now I'm backing up to the Network Attached Storage (NAS).

Restoring from File History

Once you've been running File History for a while, you can go back to the Start Screen and type "Restore Your Files" and click "Settings" to get this dialog:

There's folder I want from my Desktop but it's not there as I've deleted it before. I will click the back button (you can hold it down to go back in time fast) until I get to a day when that file existed. I can also search my entire File History for previous versions of files.

I've backed up to November 6th and there's the file on my Desktop.

Just click the green back-in-time Restore button and it's put back where it was. I can also restore it to a specific new place if I want to.

I hope this helps you. It's helped me!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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How can you not love a tiny computer? I posted about Top 10 Raspberry Pi Myths and Truths and since then I'm up to four Raspberry Pi devices. The most recent is the new Raspberry Pi "Model B" that includes 512 megs of RAM.

Sure, Raspberry Pis aren't fast, but what they lack in performance they make up for with chutzpah. They have a nice GPU as well which will decode 1080p MP4 video in hardware and play it just fine. Even better, for about $4 you can get a license to unlock MPEG-2 or VC-1 decoding in hardware.

I also have a Netduino and Netduino Plus as well as an Arduino that I use with the greatest FPS Controller in history, the SpaceTec SpaceOrb along with a custom OrbShield that provides a bridge between the RS-232 Serial Port and the Arduino.

All these devices are very reasonably priced and a great fun for kids or adults.  Next I'm looking at the PIX-6T4 "game console" that lets you write tiny games in C# on a Netduino Mini or perhaps a Netduino Go.

Don't listen to the folks who write negative headlines about the Raspberry Pi. Sure, it's the wild west but with a little patience you'll do fine. There's an amazing community around the Raspberry Pi.

The amount of excitement around these tiny machines is amazing. There's even a Kickstarter for a "Picade" tiny arcade cabinet.

To make things easier once you get your Pi, I do recommend the Adafruit Raspberry Pi Budget Pack if you don't want to go hunting for parts. This kit includes a great little clear case, a 4 gig SD Card (actually a mini with an adapter, which is great since the Netduino Plus has a mini SD slot), cables and power, but best of all, a breadboard, wires and a lovely little ribbon cable and "cobbler" that makes it super easy to keep things tidy while still messing with the Raspberry Pi's GPIO (General Purpose Input Output) connections.

Related posts you might like

• Top 10 Raspberry Pi Myths and Truths
• Adding AirPlay to a Receiver without an Apple TV - Raspbmc and the Raspberry Pi

What's great about the Raspberry Pi and small devices like it isn't the price -although that's great - it's that the Raspberry Pi has a GPIO and HDMI. This means it's the easiest and cheapest little PC that can talk to the outside world's many hardware devices. Having the combination of  HDMI out (for your TV) and GPIO (for everything else) means it's extremely accessible to the beginner.

That GPIO port along with its ease of programming gives rise to such fun as as the RetroPie GPIO Adapter that let you hook up your old Super Nintendo (SNES) controllers to a Pi! You can order a RetroPie GPIO Adapter here. Here is Video of the RetroPie in action. I am not affiliated with this creative person at all, I just dig the idea.

So I've got four now. Some friends have tweeted me saying that they bought one Raspberry Pi and haven't gotten around to doing antyhing with it, usually because they aren't sure WHAT to use it for.

Here's what my Pi's are currently doing:

• My first Pi is running as an XBMC machine in my living room. I put Raspbmc on it and while I've got my Synology NAS hooked up and serving media to it, I ended up using this Raspberry Pi mostly as an Airplay "catcher" that I throw video at from my iPad.
• My second Pi was for the kids. They built a LEGO Raspberry Pi Case and it's their primary PC. They think they are playing SCUMMVM games but they are actually learning how to read. ;)
• I gave my third Pi to my 13 year old nephew. He is loading games on it as fast as he can, checking out SNES Emulators while I try to convince him to write his own game.
• My new fourth Pi is going to be my GPIO playground. I want to learn more about hardware and now that folks are actively hacking things like Monogame onto it, it's becoming even more attractive to me. I like learning Python but Mono on a Raspberry Pi seems like great fun.

I'm sure there are more reasons to buy more Raspberry Pis. Here's a few.

Seventeen Awesome Raspberry Pi Projects

These are some exciting and fun projects for you to explore with Raspberry Pi that might make your Pi feel more useful and get you playing today!

• NFC (Near Field Communications) for Raspberry Pi
• BerryTerminal - Your Pi as a thin client
• RaspBMC - An amazing auto-updating Media Center front end
• Screenly - Digital Signage for your Pi!
• Super Nintendo and RaspberryPI with RetroPie - Pull out those old SNES controllers and hook them up to an emulator!
• PiCade:  Mame + Tiny Arcade = Crazy Delicious. How tiny an arcade could you have? Or perhaps a Coffee Table Pi? Folks have NeoGeo working too!
• C64 Emulator - Because it has to be done.
• Even better, put a Raspberry Pi INSIDE a C64
• Automate your Home - Hookup a Pi to a ZigBee
• Internet Radio - Create a tiny internet radio
• Robots! - A device this small is great for driving a robot
• Run Quake. In 3D. - Because that's insane.
• Security Penetration Testing - Raspberry Pwn. Yes, that's Pwn.
• Speech Recognition - I think you're getting the idea.
• Give it a Camera - Any external thing can be made to work. Here's a Camera module.
• One Button Audiobook Player - For Grandma.
• Arduino Adapter for Raspberry Pi - Reuse is cool

Be sure to check out the Element 14 Community Site for Raspberry Pi. I also love AdaFruit and their Pi-related products like the Adafruit Pi Box (I have 2) or the Budget Pack (I have 1).

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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