You're listening to syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats out there. Just grab yourself in and get ready. Here's Scott Zelensky and West Boss. Welcome to syntax.
This is the podcast with the tastiest treats on running backups and home servers. Today we're going to be talking about specifically Scott and I both use a Synology or however, there's lots of different things that we'll do what we're talking about today. So basically this big box that you put in your office or your home somewhere and it will run backups for you as well as you can run apps on it that are. It's pretty cool.
It looks like some apps for home server use, which is pretty nifty with me as always. Is Mr. Scott Telensky. How are you doing today?
Scott? Hey, I'm doing good. I'm just going to be in the editing booth all day, editing the next level of tutorial series. I did it on ScreenFlow this time.
So things are a little different for me. The editing process I'm actually doing myself this time and it is feeling a little bit occasionally difficult. But yeah, it's feeling a little difficult. ScreenFlow is definitely a learning curve for me.
So I'm getting used to it. And I feel good about the content though. That's the good part is that my performance, so to say, or the recordings all went really super well. So I'm not having to do a ton of editing, but when I am, I'm like, what's that keyboard shortcut again?
What am I supposed to do here? Whatever. Yeah. Yeah, definitely getting used to it.
What about or maybe we should do an entire hasty on this because people always ask like, should I use like a Pro software or should I use ScreenFlow, which is more geared towards screencat? Maybe let's let's stop this right now and we'll have a whole because you have experience with both. I do. We should do a little hasty on it.
Kind of the benefits that pros and cons. Yeah, definitely. And I have some choice words to say about screenflows, social media presence. They're all safer.
No time. All right. Cool. Today we're sponsored by Sanity, which is a structured content CMS and fresh books, which is a beautiful cloud accounting.
So let's get into it. So basically these Synology and I think Scott and I both have the exact same one. I have the Synology Disk Station 918 plus and it's essentially just a little computer without a monitor on it. And it's got four drive bays, which you can fill with hard drives.
We'll talk about that in just a second. You boot the thing up and it runs its own proprietary Linux OS and it does all of the backing up and and rate for you. But then there's also some kind of fun stuff you can do on it. So that's kind of what this whole show is about.
It's got you the same one, right? I do. And I love it. I kind of for a little bit.
You had it for a while. Yeah. I had even I even this is my first now. This is my first trip down the nazling.
I had the it was like a my cloud EX. It was like their business. It was like Western Digital's business. It was like a solution and it was about the exact same size and exact same structure as the Synology one that we have here.
In fact, the disks that I'm using in this are actually from that drive before. So I even migrated the the disks from my previous naz to this current one. Awesome. We should say naz is both a wicked artist and also a network attached storage, which is that you you plug this thing directly into your router or switch or something like that.
And you have it available on your network as well as Synology does some pretty cool stuff where you can access the thing when you're not on your local network, but you don't have to do like port forwarding or dynamic DNS or any of any of that stuff. Like maybe ship back up. But if you want to access a home server from outside of that, you usually have to first you have to port forward something. So when somebody visits your IP address for your home, then you have to forward that to the specific device.
But the other thing is that most internet home internet connections will change your IP address when you read with the router or something like that. And if that changes, then you're out of luck. So if the run sign called dynamic DNS, which will constantly be pinging the outside world to ask, what is my IP address? What is my IP address?
And when that changes, it will just change the DNS settings of your domain name. So you have like a domain name for your your your your Synology. So all she does that all under the hood for you, which is called, I don't know, they have a person sort of product, which is pretty cool. Because you can just use all of the apps, just work outside of the house without you having to configure them.
Yeah, that was actually one of my favorite things about the Synology, especially compared to the Western digital version of this sort of thing where I felt like Synology does a lot for you in those aspects that I don't have to manage that stuff. I'm not I didn't get a NAS drive to become a system administrator or something like this. I got to help me back up my data, help me orchestrate some things. So overall, the Synology product side of things I'm very satisfied with in terms of the differences between all of the different NAS or network area storage.
Options out there. So when you buy this thing, the first thing you have to do is slap it full of hard drives and there's kind of two big hard drives that you go for in the space because you have to get a hard drive. You don't have to, but you get a hard drive that is made for NAS because they are almost constantly reading, writing and checking the data on the disks. So they need to be rated for a lot of use.
And the two big ones out there are Western digital red or C gate iron wolf. I opted for the C gate iron wolves just because they were about 20 bucks cheaper a drive and I did my fair share of Reddit. And you know who else has has good stats on drive failure is backblaze because they've got millions of hard drives and they have to swap them out whenever they die. So they keep stats on how often their different types of drives fail and the C gate iron wolf looked pretty good on their stats.
That's fascinating. I wouldn't expect that, but it makes total sense. I have the WD red drives because like I mentioned, I previously owned a WD NAS and it came with two and then when I bought two more, it mirrored those. So I have four four terabyte drives.
Yeah, that's exactly what I did as well. So you slap them in and it just stops. Yeah, yeah. I don't know what to do.
I'm going to have you slapped a lot of drives in your lifetime here. I've definitely dropped a few and I lost them. So I got four four terabytes as well, which I run them in raid five, which means that you get 10 and a half terabytes of actual usable space. And then if one of the drives were to die, you would not lose any data.
And the idea is you can actually even prep them beforehand. It's called a hot swap. So you prep it ready to go. And then if one, I should actually do this maybe today, I ordered another one because if one dies and you slap a new one in and it will just rebuild your file structure based on that.
You won't lose any data. So I probably shouldn't have done raid five because I don't need 10 and a half terabytes. I'm looking at it right now. I have 1.3 terabytes use and you did raid.
No, you use something else, right? I used a Synology hybrid raid. S-H-R. It's an automated rage management management system from Synology designed to make storage volume, deployment quick and easy.
Wow. To be honest, I watched a lot of YouTube before this, which is, you know, if the case of a lot of things. Yeah. And I don't, I knew the details at one point, but since then I have sort of lost the details of why I chose this hybrid option.
From my understanding is, let me see. I watched the video before and apparently the speed is a bit better on the speed and the retrieval is a bit faster on rate five. So I think that's, that's kind of why I went that way. I think there was also another reason I have to forget though.
I know it's funny because their option is Synology specific. And I think that's what turned people off of this hybrid raid S-H-R is that it's proprietary to them. I think that is the major downside of it. But I again have redundancy in my backups.
So I get in half, I have four drives. They're hot, swappable. And likewise, I can switch them out in case there's any sort of issues in that direction. So I mean, I only have eight terabytes of usable space, but again, I'd say terabytes.
I'm not using that. It's amazing how cheap this storage is. Do you remember how much you spent for a 250 gigabyte USB drive at some point? I remember buying a LSE that lasted like one year and it was like 200 and some dollars for it.
I remember I was so excited. I remember very vividly riding my bike back from the computer store because hard drives were a bucket gig. And I went out like a 256 gig or no, they weren't even they were like 200 gig hard drive. And I was so excited for all the movies I was going to download and put on that thing, which is so funny.
Now they're super cheap. Like I, to give you some comparison, I bought the entire Synology and slapped it full of drives, 16 terabytes for, I think, like 1200 Canadian, which is 910 US, which is like more than a computer for more. Most people I realized that some people got mad when we talked about our expensive MacBook Pros, but I'm running a business here and my entire business is built on saving video files. So I needed to have some sort of system where I could absolutely not lose them.
By the way, one more thing I just look at a blog post here, a difference between SHR and RAID as a SHR Synology is you can mix drives. So if you've got, oh, yes, that's a two terabyte one from your uncle and four terabyte random other one, you can't do that with read. You have to buy the exact size and I think type of drives if you use RAID. And the reason specifically I wanted to do that was because I bought these four terabyte drives and I thought, you know what, in the future, if I ever wanted to upgrade, I would want to get, you know, like any terabyte drive or something, whatever, whatever is the new hotness.
You just put one in, right? And then you have all that extra storage or you get two of them. And now you have two four terabytes and one, whatever, either way, it all handles that read for you. So yes, nice, nice find on that one.
I read this page over like eight times and I did not see that. Yeah. Also, there's a couple more. If it drive fails, you can still access your data while you wait for the, like, let's say you have to Amazon or you have to wait till tomorrow to drive and you still need access to your data with RAID.
You can't with Synology, you can still get access to your data before you do. So I think there's some huge benefits there at the downside of it's a bit slower and you can't just pop one of those drives in another computer and access the raw files right away. Yeah. Yeah, totally.
Next thing I want to talk about is power. This is not something I have right now, but I learned the hard way. So they're obviously just plug it into your, your wall. But if you don't shut it down properly, it has to do the, it has to do an entire check of your entire file system.
So I accidentally unplug the power bar when I was redoing my computer and I shut it down improperly and it went for about four days of these things are loud. It goes, like the little hard drive arm be bobbing around and I was like, this is super annoying. It really does that. Yeah, it does be about the round.
I mean, this very, very simple solution to that is there's a lot of, battery backup systems that you can buy that have a USB port on them and that USB port will tell the Synology. I'm on battery power shut down either in 10 minutes or immediately. And I was just looking on Facebook marketplace and there's, this has been a thing for a long time. So for a hundred bucks, 50 bucks, you can buy a battery backup solution from APC and it will work with your Synology over USB and it will shut itself down properly.
Cause that's dangerous to shut down a hard drive mid right. So you, this is proper for you. It's something that I need to do. So I don't have to go through that again.
Yeah. So I think you all have those like double plugs, right? I mean, that's a really nice feature to have. I need a battery backup.
My friend used to always have a battery backup on his computer back when it was a PC PC and it was just for like when he was doing audio. And I was just remembering thinking like, so cool, this battery is, you know, your power can be out and your whole house and the battery. I guess that's a really nerdy thought to think that's really cool. He could use his computer.
When the power is out. How cool is that? Yeah, that'd be good. Another cool thing about these is if you have automated backups going, if you have this thing on your network, you can set up some automated backup software to have it just backup backup backup whenever you want.
You could, I think a lot of them, you can even like schedule to be honest, I use time machine, but I do through a not through the network. I do through a little plug in the drive. Yeah. Simply just because it's faster and you know, there is some weirdness, especially with time machine networks.
Sometimes the whole time machine can get invalidated and then you got to start the whole thing from scratch. Yeah. And time machine's like, I don't know what this is. And you're like, OK, yes, you do.
You back up here all the time, like your 10, 15 year old product. You should know better by now. You shouldn't be pooping your pants anymore. You're 15 years old or whatever.
You should get it figured out. So I do the exact same thing. I've not used my Synology four time machine because I've had a bad experience with a network based time machine in the past where it's working fine for entire year. And then all of a sudden it's like, can't figure it out.
And you have to start all the way from scratch, which sucks. So I've just been using these little passport to terabyte USB drives and just putting them in. Although what happened to me with that is when I was, I was having trouble with my Thunderbolt three cable, it goes into my cow digit dock and it quickly mounted and unmounted my hard drives like a thousand times. And I thought I just poached my entire time.
Which is not bad because I've got back up backups, but somebody on Twitter was like, just leave it and it will come back and I just left it for whatever however long and it was just doing a repair in the background. And it totally came back. So a little tip if that happens to you. Yeah, totally.
Another cool thing about these things is that you mean they're little computers and yeah, unlike Max, which are also little computers, you can upgrade them in various ways. So you can upgrade the ram on it. If let's say you need to do a little bit more heavy lifting as a computer, things that might require more ram, you can upgrade that ram. And that's really nice.
It's really nice that you have this little computer and it is. It's just like a little computer without a monitor without like a standard PC parts. Yeah, standard PC parts. A lot of people put quieter fans in them, although I haven't noticed the fan being allowed at all.
There is a modding thing for these, absolutely. Water cooled. Water cool makes me scared. Imagine having pipes of water near your most valuable data.
Yeah, there's phones now that are starting to come up that are water cooled. And I think really? Yeah, there's this really interesting new technology. I don't know how to do this.
So don't don't take me about a manufacturer or something. But there's this new interesting technology. There are these like really thin heat pipes. It looks like what it looks like, not like pipes.
They call them pipes, but what it actually looks like is it looks like a tin foil pouch or like a copper foil pouch. And the thing is filled with water or some kind of liquid, maybe not water, that evaporates and cools and runs through essentially a loop. And it cools, it's something like there's these, I don't know who makes this new phone. There's like some phone that is ridiculously like 64 gigs of RAM or something absurd.
Sorry. Let me pull up this one. Yes, it's cool. Find it.
Oh, interesting. It looks like the the galat or the note galaxy note at nine actually even has water cooling. So it looks like it's something that is even getting to be a little bit more mainstream. I thought it was just in some of these high powered gaming phones as they're called that do it.
But it's not just these gaming phones. It looks like it's going to be in more mainstream devices. So I think that's a technology that whether or not it works correctly or works at all is maybe yet to be seen. But I think they're at least adopting that in different ways.
That's really cool. I haven't noticed the memory going anywhere near 100%. So they give you this really nice dashboard. You can see where your memory is at and I've never go close to 100%.
So I don't think I need you and I'm doing a lot. We'll talk about that in just a bit, but I don't think it's necessary to upgrade it just yet. One other thing I should say is that Kenzie Dodds was saying on Twitter that he got the same one we did after we were talking about it. And then he said it was too loud for him and his wife, especially when it's checking.
It's loud. It's like, so he swapped him out with SSDs, which you can do. It's just I priced it out to put like, I think a couple of terabytes SSDs was freaking out much. It was like $3,000 to fill this thing with SSDs.
So that's a good solution if you have a lot of money. But if it's a bit loud for you, another option you can do is you can set it to not check itself until you're away. So I find it annoying when I'm sitting here at my desk so you can put a schedule in there so that only at night will it start to do this thing or only during the day. Although I am considering moving mine to a closet because all it requires is a power and a ethernet cord.
So I think I'm going to move it with a closet where our printer is just because it's sometimes is a little bit too loud for me. Yeah. And actually, this might be a good opportunity to talk about the sick. I had a couple of weeks ago or maybe the last week with those little thermostats.
That might be a good option for your server closet as now we would become because you don't want that. Especially if it's a closet, you don't want that getting too hot frying your drives and then. Yeah. Good point.
Yeah. Keep a little Bluetooth thermostat in there that one that I recommended and you'll always going to know what the temperature is in the room just to make sure it's not toasted in there. Because that is the thing. I had my buddy again, who's an audio engineer.
It's like having your studio, essentially be uber quiet is of most importance, right? Obviously. And so he always had soundproof rooms and soundproof closets that not only would his things like his backup drives live in, but his Mac Pro would actually live in there and it would come through some heavy cables coming in. So that's definitely a consideration to have that sort of room, just making sure it's properly cooled and temperature controlled is a big importance.
Yeah. That's a great point. One other thing I didn't talk about is you can set up different mounts for it. So you don't have like one big folder on your Synology for everything.
What I do is I sort of slice it up into different volumes. So I've got one huge volume that I put every single course that I've ever worked on. I put it on there as a backup as well as an archive. And then I also have another one just for like family photos and things like that.
And I've got another volume for TV shows and movies and things like that. And it's kind of nice because you can mount them and have different security preferences for each of those. And then you don't have to worry about your Plex getting hacked and then having access to all your family photos or something like that because they are separate, separate volumes at the end of the day, which is pretty nifty. Super nifty.
You know what else is nifty Scott? Hey, I do. It's a sanity at sanity.io. How do I know that?
I don't know how I knew that very impressive Scott. Yeah. So sanity is the structured content CMS. You want to check it out at sanity and it y dot IO forward slash syntax.
That's going to actually give you double the free usage tier, which is pretty cool. So so sanity is a structured content CMS. It's the back end to your front end. It's a it was fits in the headless CMS space and they're always kind of doing some some really cool stuff over at sanity.
We've talked about them a lot. One thing I want to focus in on for this ad read is squizzy. So do you know what Kahoot is Scott? Kahoot.
Kahoot is like this like quizzing thing that they use in a lot of classrooms when you want to like quiz classroom or gather responses from the classroom. We have something called quiz down. Oh, OK. So what sanity did is they made squizzy, which is a serverless Kahoot clone powered by sanity.io, which is so cool because like this is a full blown application and then they've open sourced it so you can see all of the code behind it.
And it's obviously real time because you need to see all of that data being pulled in at a real time. And I think that's so cool. Like if you want to learn how to build a real time application, take a look at squizzy and see how that's done. You can use sanity for all the heavy lifting back end stuff.
And I'm not sure what is the front end. It's hosted on sites now the front end. Let's see what language they used. They use view.
Beautiful. That would be a fun little project to take into to learn both view and headless CMS sanity. More like beautiful, beautiful. So just go to their blog for a link to squizzy, but make sure when you do sign up, go to sanity.io forward slash syntax get double the free usage tier.
Thanks so much to sanity for sponsoring. Cool. So let's talk about, well, let's back it up for a second here to talk about backing up our backups. Let's talk about backing up the backups.
Can I say that anymore? Yes. OK, this is an interesting topic to me because right now, because what I don't do, I don't do any sort of backup. No backup.
Be back up backing up of my backups. Nope. I only have the rate. So all of my data lives inside of my household, which is a recipe for disaster.
If there was a fire disaster of any time, you know, maybe both drives crash at the same time, anything that is beyond my control. I could lose every single video. Except for the, well, I have all this stuff. I could lose all my project files.
I have all of the everything I was backed up on S3, but I don't have my drives backed up anywhere. Yeah. So there's a couple options you can have for this. You really want a copy of your data on site and a copy of your data off site to prevent from fire and theft, things like that.
And one thing I looked at was just you can get another Synology and slap it full of drives and put it at a friend's house or like maybe it's got night. If I had decent internet, we could just say we could give each other a couple of terabytes each and then Scott would back his up on mine and I would back mine up on his and you can encrypt it. So like Scott wouldn't be able to go ahead and release my next course. Something like that, which I would.
And I would actually just here's what I would do. I would Photoshop in the video, my face on top of yours and then run it through some vocal modifications and then that's my next course. What do you mean your next course? I'll take yours.
Hey, what's up? This is West Boss from Love Love Tutorials. Oh, that'd be great. So that's an option.
My option that I went with is you can there's two apps on the Synology that will allow you to sync your data. I'm using one called Cloud Sync. And then there's also another one that allows you to just straight up mirror your data from one to another. So the sink, well, what the sink will do is if your data changes on either side, it's kind of like Dropbox, it will sync with the other side.
And then the other, the mirroring one will just straight up mirror it. And then you can hook up these apps to anywhere that will give you disk space. And they have things for all Amazon SES, Amazon Glacier, which is there, I think it's tape backup. Crazy.
Have you ever looked into tape? I watched a video on how tape storage works. I know how tape storage works just from a music sense, because a lot of stuff is backed up to tape in the audio world. But OK, yeah, tape is cool.
But I'm not back up to tape because Glacier is like that. It's slow. And I think if you want lots of data, it's very expensive to get off. So what I opted to do is to use Backblaze B2, which is some of the cheapest raw data storage that you can possibly get.
And I take the volume on my Synology that I think is just under a terabyte of videos that I have all the project files and everything. And then I just mirror that to backblaze B2. And then the way that it works is that you pay for data transfer into backblaze B2, I think you pay for getting it out. And then the big cost is you pay for just sitting on their servers.
So one terabyte of sitting data is five bucks a month. So it comes down to every hundred gigs that you want to put on backblaze to just have it sit there is five bucks. But the kind of cool thing about backblaze is if you ever do need to get that data, you can obviously download it from them, but they'll also send you like a hard drive or they'll send you like a NAS if you have like 20 terabytes. Yeah, I didn't know that.
Yeah, it's pretty cool. So if you ever like in some cases, if you've got a lot of data, the fastest way to move that data is by a truck or a plane and they'll ship it to you. So it's pretty cool. I'm I'm doing five bucks a month to back up every single thing that is important to me on the backblaze B2.
It did just stop, which makes me worried. So I have to look into that. And I did have an earlier issue where I was playing with the, there's two gigabit ethernet ports on the back and I was trying to like bridge them on two different ISPs to make faster upload. And I think I did something goofy during that and it just stopped working.
So I just read it and the whole thing. It took me like, I don't know, maybe two or three weeks to upload all the data. But once that was done, then I know that I have a copy of everything on backblaze B2. And I'm really big on backup being passive.
You shouldn't have to remember to back anything up. You should just be able to drop it on a drive in the process. This will do their thing and back them up for you. Yeah, because if you are the bottleneck there, it's not going to get done.
Totally. Yeah. I know myself well enough to know that like, even though I'm very cognizant of this stuff, if I don't make it a process, it's not going to get done. I actually, I take an automating as many things as possible in my life approach to everything in life, whether that's personal finances or whatever, you know, automate deposits into savings accounts, automate obviously all your retirement stuff, automate all your bills, pay, automate any of that stuff that you possibly can because you're going to forget about it.
One other thing I should say is a lot of people say, like, why did you spend almost a thousand dollars on this when you probably could have just uploaded this tobacco for five bucks a month, like a thousand dollars, five bucks a month. I would have got 200 months. That's one and a half years worth, right? So I guess once you pass one and a half years, the thing pays for itself.
And also I need my stuff locally because if I ever need to work on something, I need it really quickly. And if I need to download, like my last course, I think was 300 gigs of video files. If I need to do that, I need it on my computer as fast as possible. And I've got wired gigabit ethernet locally here.
I can have that on my hard drive in a couple of minutes versus downloading that. My internet is not that fast. I wouldn't be able to download it that quickly. Yeah.
Now, having everything locally accessible is a big deal. I also like it because it's in your house. It's yours. It's your data.
It's your stuff. It lives in your house, not on somebody else's computer. You don't have to worry about anything if backblaze goes bankrupt tomorrow and all of a sudden your data is gone or they suffer some sort of catastrophe. You have still at the end of the day, some hard drives in your living room or wherever you keep this thing.
You don't got to keep on it. I'm living room, but no, I really agree with that. I think these things are very important. Not to mention your data is worth the cost to backup, especially if your data is important.
If you're doing the types of things that we're doing where, you know, your whole business or whatever relies on these things, it's important. And I know many small businesses and most small businesses do require some sort of network storage for collaboration amongst documents and all sorts of other things. And we get into a second. I think these apps are a killer feature of this thing as well because a lot of these apps in this really replace functionality of many cloud services that you've come to use and maybe feel a little bit irked out about some of the privacy things going on with these cloud companies in 2020.
Yeah, you can just run your own cloud services pretty much on all of these things. There's always a self-hosted version. Now that obviously takes a lot more work to self-host it, but it certainly is an option and having a Synology, I bought it as a backup thing and I was surprised at how happy I was at all of the apps that you could put on it because they're fantastic. It's like having a laptop that never accidentally gets closed.
Like I did run a home server on like old MacBook for a while and it was hooked up to our TV. But every now and then the kids will kick the power cord on it and it would die and you have to like open the thing again and sometimes it needed updates and things like that. So it's so much easier running it on this and all G9s. Yeah, totally.
So what apps do you use? So I use a lot of apps. Do you want to get the first one or do you want me? Because I have the second one here that I really like that you might not know about.
OK, the two apps that I use a lot are Plex and MB and I actually ended up going, I talked about this before, I ended up going full on MB. I don't have any. Yeah, Plex is flex and MB are like home. I don't know how do you describe them home media solutions.
Yeah, home media solutions. So essentially you've got all of these movies that you've ripped from your DVD collection and put onto your computer. Plex will take all of those movies and give you a nice interface as well as you can view them anywhere in the world just from your home server. So like I have a whole bunch of kids shows on ours and I can open up the Plex or the MB app on my phone when I'm at my parents and Chromecast it so my parents TV for my kids.
And that's awesome because freaking Netflix takes off the shows that my kids like because of some licensing thing and then they're like, well, where's the show? But if you have it on your own server, you know that data is not going anywhere. You can just play it directly from your thing. You obviously have to have a fast upload speed and unlimited bandwidth to do that.
But I've got 10 megabit op and it's never been an issue for me. Yeah. And they also transcode. So MB is like Plex except it also does live TV.
So you can pipe in either what's called a HD home run, which will take us, which will take an antenna signal or you can pipe in what's called IPTV, which is like a digital list of live TV channels and then you can get guides that will show you what channels are on when and then just like a TV or something like that, you can record shows in the future and record all of a series and then MB or Plex both of them will automatically put those into folders and download album art and figure out the characters in the show and give you descriptions of each of the show. And it's so cool to be able to do it. I never had a TV before this. So this is kind of the first time I've had something like this and I'm a big fan of that.
Yeah. I think these things are fantastic because again, you're owning the information essentially on your your storage. You're not requiring any sort of service. And again, I use Plex myself.
I like that I can dump a bunch of media in there. I'm a collector of old Kung Fu movies, many of which are impossible to get. So I have like a collection of 200 some Kung Fu movies and wow, it's just a fantastic job of pulling all the artwork and sometimes it goofs up and you got to tell it whatever. I have an extensive also an extensive collection of be boy or break dancing DVDs that I've acquired through any small competitions that I showed up.
I have a whole bunch of stuff actually, one of which I'm on. And I want to keep all that stuff nice in the place where I can look and watch it anytime because who has a DVD player hand anymore? I don't even have an optical CD drive anywhere handy that I can. I don't either.
I have one external that I can plug in if I want to rip something. To be honest, I don't really have anything super available. One up that I've really come to really appreciate recently is this storage analyzer. Have you seen this?
No, what is it? What is this late night TV shows? How Scott? So storage analyzer, its name suggests exactly what it is.
It allows you to analyze the storage of any of your volumes. And the cool thing is you generate these reports and you can generate reports on a schedule. So you can say, hey, go ahead and generate this report every single day, first thing, and then save the report to a specific link. And these reports are sort of like you can imagine like with Daisy Disc or something where it's telling you really like what your files are, where your files are living, how much storage they're taking up.
And one of the cooler things for me is that I know I have a whole bunch of files that I've just collected over the years on various drives. I've had several different computers, whatever. Chances are I don't want to overshoot this number too much, but I would say maybe like 30% of my files on my NAS are probably duplicate files in some sort of way, right? Yeah, maybe it's a video that's been uploaded twice or something and that's a ton of redundant space and if you're paying for backups and backblaze or something, that's a bunch of wasted money.
So it can also analyze for duplicate files. And I find that to be super duper handy. I've also ran a Linux utility before for finding duplicate files, but this was a little bit nicer. I think this is really cool.
This is made by Plex or made by Synology. Cool. Yeah, the Synology apps that they ship are really good, which is pretty cool. You know what else is really good Scott?
Backblaze makes sure all of your backups are fresh, right Scott? It does. We recommend that you check out the other fresh service that we love over here at Syntax being a fresh books. Now, fresh books is not a NAS and it's not a network area storage drive.
But what it is is a cloud accounting software and if you run any sort of small business, which we know a lot of you do, whether or not you're freelancers or you're a developer for a small business of a few people or even a decent size agency, you probably have books. You probably have invoices to send. You probably have accounting to do. And let's face it, who really likes doing accounting?
We're developers. We're not accountants. I worked as an accountant for one year. Let me tell you, don't love it.
So if you want to have easy accounting, you're going to want to check out freshbooks.com because they work with everything that you could possibly utilize already. We're talking Stripe. We're talking Gusto. We're talking Shopify.
We're talking about Google, G Suite, all those things that you already used within your workflows. And not to mention, there's a whole host of amazing features that come along with FreshBooks that we talk about just about every single ad rate. So that includes time tracking, expense tracking, payments, reporting, notifications for invoices, all sorts of stuff. You're going to want to check out freshbooks at freshbooks.com forward slash syntax and then syntax and how did you hear about us in the whole getting started business.
So check out FreshBooks. We're big, big fans of this cloud accounting software over here on the podcast. Beautiful. Another thing you can run on your Synology NAS is Docker.
So Docker is, it's really nice to be able to do that because obviously the NAS itself is a Linux server where you can run anything you want. But if you want to run a couple of different applications, it's probably better to put them in their own container so that first of all, they can't talk to each other. That's a big security thing. But also it's really easy to blow away things or restart a certain Docker image and things like that or assign a certain port to an image.
It's really neat. And there are tons of different Docker images for all kinds of different applications. In fact, I think a lot of the apps that are in the Synology App Store are just Docker images under the hood, which is pretty cool. Yeah.
And along with it, you can run and install Node.js on here. Hey, you got a Node app? And it's all a Node app, throw it up on a port and get that thing up and running. And all of a sudden in Bingo, you have your own locally accessible application.
Maybe you're building some home utility, maybe you have like a Raspberry Pi and you want to build an app that talks to it. Maybe you got like home automation, tablet, et cetera, around the house or something. You can have your own application running on your own server. You can put a database on there to save like home stuff.
You can put a database. Yeah. So there's this thing called docu, D-O-K-K-U, which is a Docker-based clone of Heroku. And I tried getting this running on DigitalOcean a while ago and I couldn't for the life when we figure out how to make it work just nicely.
But maybe I'll give it another shot because I would sometimes I just want to host silly little apps that aren't for the entire world but are just internally for me or for a couple friends. If that's the case, then this thing could be a little web server for you. Yeah. I think the possibilities are so endless and I haven't done anything with that other than their apps.
I'm so excited to try out some more of this stuff. One kind of cool thing I learned from you is that they have a security camera software, which is cool because you can buy any IP camera, including the Wyscams that we like. And you can put them in RTSP mode, which is real-time streaming protocol. And any camera that supports RTSP, which is almost all of them except for your custom nest ones or whatever.
And Wyscams out of the box without their custom firmware. Yeah, Wyscams won't do it, but you can flash it with the RTSP firmware. And then you can just hook it up. I used it myself.
I flashed a Wyscam and set this up and you can record unlimited. I've got freaking how many terabytes of space you could record like a Wyscam or on 32 gigs will record for an entire week. So imagine how much of a terabyte you can record for. Yeah.
Long time. You try this out as well? I have not tried it out. I have it installed.
I have it sitting there as one of those things on my to-do list. And once I got, I mean, I got so far into, I got the Wyscam running RTSP mode, I thought this was like, I thought it was going to be really cool and easy and I just never did the Synology part of it. So I'm going to have to set it up via Synology because I have the camera running and it would be really super cool to have a neat little home security system doing that. But no, I haven't done that.
Yeah, it's expensive. Yeah. I think they give you one camera or two cameras for free and then you have to pay, let's look it up because this is kind of cool. But this is the solution to people who are scared to put cameras in their house because you are exposing them to the internet.
So if you want to have IP cameras but only available on your local network, that's the sort of the solution is it's called Surveillance Station. And there's also another one that you can run on there and it's called Blue Iris, which seems to be a lot cheaper. I have not yet tried it out yet myself though. Yeah, I wonder if the name we should do a comparison.
Blue Iris versus Surveillance Station. It's cool because they have like iPhone apps. Synology has iPhone apps for their surveillance cameras. They have apps for like they have a Moment's app that's like a Google Photos replacement.
Yeah. Can I talk about those for a bit? Yeah. Because I don't know who use those.
I use the Moment's app and the Drive apps. And let me tell you, they're great. They do a good job of taking up that functionality. Moment's app, I mean by no means is it as good as Google Photos, but it's darn really, really good for what you'd expect it to be.
It's way better than I thought it would be. You can search, it does machine learning on your thing. So you can search for a flower or snowboarding and it will find it to do face tagging. Yeah.
And it's, it, I mean, they totally ripped off Google Photos. So it's not like you're having to learn some sort of interface here. But you can also have it save every photo that you take on your phone automatically upload to your now automatically uploading your moments. You can do all sorts of sharing options just like you do with Google Photos.
And so if you're the type of person who's like, I don't want Google to have every single photo I take of my family and whatever and use it for their algorithms, you can set up your own moment system on this. It's going to be really nice. And likewise with that, you also have the ability to do the same thing with folders all out of Google Drive. And this one ripped off Google Drive so much that they even called it Drive, which is fun.
And it's just as good. You can set the same sort of backup and sync functionality that you have with Google Drive on your desktop. Yeah. You can have like a, a, a, a, a Synology Drive folder on your computer that automatically backs up or is available in the cloud.
I use this for sharing all my files with my video editor as opposed to paying for that storage space on Dropbox or something. What I do is I basically just say, Hey, here's the folder. I share with him and I say this folder is only available via URL. You know, it's a publicly accessible via this URL.
But you know, only those of you who have the URL can access it. And then just like any sort of Google Drive, Share, Lake or Dropbox, Share, Link, they can access that stuff and it's not living on anybody else's servers at the end of the day. It's all mine. Yeah.
That's beautiful. So I'm just looking up a license for Synology surveillance station is about 50 bucks a camera. Wow. So that's one time payment.
It looks like it's one time payment for that. And blue iris seems yearly. And I think you get unlimited cameras. I can't find it on their website, which is like, that's the one thing that people want to be able to use, right?
Mm hmm. I found this home defense Reddit and a post called as opinion on Synology versus blue iris. There are most of what it one says. I was definitely go with blue iris, but then they link to a site called IP cam talk and it says that you will find some strong opinions on that here.
So that might be a good place to at least dive into a little bit more of the looks like blue iris is about a hundred bucks a year and you get up to 64 cameras. So I think either way, like I think about like my ring camera. I think a ring camera is three bucks a month per camera. So that's 36 bucks a year.
And then the ring doesn't even allow you. It doesn't constantly record. So if you want to like look back at a certain point in time, then you're poached. The wise cams are totally free and you can put an SD card in, which is cool.
But but then you open it up to the internet, which they did have a security issue a couple of weeks ago. So it's not that expensive if you want to run your own show, which is pretty cool. Yeah. Certainly I even like at Costco and like Costco has these like old AV cams and like they have this like box that the cameras go into.
And those things are a couple hundred bucks as well. And I look at them like, come on, you could go buy a IP camera and run this thing on a Synology instead of like this like random box that is proprietary. Totally. Yeah.
Yeah, I know. I like this one. Especially because I feel like I have this thing and it's so capable of doing so many things and I feel like I'm only scratching the surface of how capable it actually is. So I think to me this is particularly fascinating just because of those aspects.
One fun thing is that the Synology, if you're getting a NAS drive, okay, so we're talking a lot about Synology here. The Synology is definitely a little bit more expensive, but if you're getting a NAS drive and you want to be doing any sort of this kind of stuff, you're going to want to make sure it's at least powerful enough to do it because now all NAS drives are created equal in that regard. For instance, I my previous NAS drive functioned very appropriately as a network area storage. I could drag files on it.
I could back them up. I could do all sorts of stuff. Any kind of heavy lifting, running servers, running apps, anything like that, the whole thing just came to a crashing down because it wasn't made for that. I mean, you could.
There's a whole marketplace where you could install Plex on it. But guess what? Plex requires processing and RAM to process the transcode the video, right? If you want a Chromecast or do you want a 4K streaming?
Yeah, you want to stream? You want to do anything like that? The NAS it needs to be able to be powerful enough to do it. And so I had this whole library of movies that I wanted to watch and then half of them wouldn't work because they needed to be transcoded to work.
And the NAS was just sort of like, hey, I can't do it. I'm not a powerful enough computer. I'm not a beefy enough processor to take care of that. So it's something to keep in mind when you're looking at these different products.
Other one that I tried is this thing called Pihole, which is a it's meant to be run on a Raspberry Pi and it's a custom DNS server. So real quick, how DNS works is that when you go to a website like westboss.com, a DNS server will line up westboss.com with the IP address of the server that actually runs westboss.com. And that's what people mean when they say DNS propagation, because when you change the name servers on a domain name, they need to propagate through everybody who offers a DNS service. So Google offers one, Cloudflare offers one, your ISP will offer one by default if you don't set any custom ones.
And what's cool about this is that you can run your own DNS server in front of an existing one and you can use that to do ad blocking. So the Pihole will run on a Raspberry Pi or you can just it's just a Linux application. So you can just run it on a, I ran it on my Synology. And then you set your DNS of either your router, if you want your entire house to be done like this or on the device by device.
So you put it on your TV or on your phone or your computer. And then what will happen is it will first talk to Pihole and say, is this an ad request? Because they know they have known lists of IP addresses that are used for serving ads and it will just block it at the DNS level. So it will never resolve in the browser.
And how that's better than an ad blocker is that if you have ads on your TV or you have ads on your phone, your inside of an iOS app that has like one of those annoying pop up ads, all of those will be blocked in the app itself, which is pretty cool. And then if it's not blocked, it will just pass it along to your custom DNS. So I use Cloudflare 1.1.1.1. Have you had any issues?
So I was having issues. I think I went a little heavy handed with a block list. So you have to compile your own list of blocks. And there's these popular lists out there.
And I added, I think I just used a recommended ones or something like that. And it was a little too heavy handed where it was blocking stuff that I actually needed. So I think most people say just like go easy on it. And I just turned it off and I just use app blocker in my thing.
And it's kind of annoying when you're in apps. And certainly it's more than just blocking ads. It's privacy and tracking as well. How hard was it all to set up?
Was it a pain to set up? Yes. Yeah, it was. Like there's a Docker image for it and that didn't work.
And then, oh, sorry, I did use the Docker image, but there was like a blog post that I found. And it took me about an hour. I think if I read it more carefully, it would have been quicker. But I sort of skimmed over it being like, I know what I'm doing.
And then I was really frustrated with it. But I was pretty cool. I would probably try it out and sell it. I still have it running.
I'm just not using it. So there's also another one that Synology offers is called custom DNS server. And that will work just as well. I don't think it gives you stats like Pi hold does though.
And Pi hold gives you a whole web interface where you can you can allow things and block things and set timers and things like that, which is cool. I'm very fascinated by having not dove into any of this stuff. I'm gonna have to start watching some YouTube. Yeah, it's fun.
Like sometimes on like a Friday afternoon, I'll like finish something about noon. I was like, all right, I'm gonna do something fun this afternoon. What is going to be fun for me is installing Pi hold. Totally.
Yeah. Yeah. It's not a Pi hold game. Am I a trip in or is that that's coronal?
That'd be fun. If Pi, yeah, cornhole. Cornhole. In the face.
Yeah. Yeah. I'm about ready to buy all the Raspberry Pi stuff because you can get it done for about 30 bucks. But then I was like, oh, this is just a Linux thing.
I can just run this on my Synology. That's the whole thing about Synology. I saw like there's a one click install for discourse. You know, you can install any of the stuff that you can install on a server.
If you could host your own discourse, right? Host your own discourse. Hold on anything. You could do that.
It's really interesting and fascinating to me. I'm really interested to hear from our audience because I know a lot of a lot of you have NAS store NAS store, NAS store, NAS store, or redundant, whatever. I know a lot of you have network area storage drives. So I want to hear what you're doing with them.
The fascinating stuff that we haven't touched on. We're not doing. I want to get inspired here. So hit us up and just up on Twitter.
Let us know what you are doing with your network area storage. And if there's any cool mods, anybody put some under glow on there, anything like that. I want to see it. Some spoilers.
Whatever you got. You can be cows. Yeah. I want to see it.
Yeah. Twitter was so helpful in all of the stuff because I had no aside from knowing that you had the Haddisonology, I didn't know which one. I just asked on Twitter, like, I need something to back it up and people were so helpful with app recommendations and hardware recommendations. And I was like, this is great.
And I just drove right to the store and went and bought one. I've had it for, I don't know, three months so far and I've been so happy with it. Yeah, fantastic. And if you're on the fence of this type of thing, in my opinion, they are well worth the cost.
Like there is an entry fee to this kind of thing. But if you have any sort of data that you need backed up, this is such a good solution for that. And if the difference is a couple hundred bucks in my mind, it's worth saving up that extra couple hundred bucks to get the Synologyverse, maybe a cheaper one as somebody who had the cheaper one and then had to try to sell it later on and stuff like that, it was not worth it to go with the cheaper option. Oh, one more thing is they sell expansion drives that you can just hook up.
The one of the ports in the back, which port, what's it called? Ethernet. It's called a E-SAD port. E-SAD, yeah.
So you can get the like two drive one and just get up and running because like most people are not going to have as much videos as us. But like the two port one will be fine in almost all cases. Totally. And then that's 400 Canadian right now, which is probably like 350, 325 American.
And then you can, if you really need to expand in the future, you can just buy the expansion thing and plug it in, slap it full of drives, you're good to go. Just start slapping drives in there. Yeah. You can get the 10 drive one or whatever they have.
Yeah, they have some really big ones. All right. So I'm just going to add, I don't think so. Yeah, no, I'm just curious to do what kind of a lot of people are doing here.
I'm fascinated by this stuff. It's all really interesting. Cool. All right.
Let us know. It's we just at syntax FM. We would love to hear your Synology and NAS tips. Yeah, NAS tips.
Cool. So now is the time in the show in which we talk about our sick pics, which are going to be things that we find to be sick, like totally sick, like super duper sick stuff that we really, really like. Now I have something that's a little interesting today. Unfortunately, it's gender specific here.
However, I will say I was never sold on the brand Lulu Lemon because they have that whole controversy where the pants were too thin, the materials too thin, right? And there was like some quality issues. But then I listened to the, how I built this on Lulu Lemon and it was like really fascinating to me that the way they created the company and Courtney for Christmas. They're Canadian.
Is it Canadian? Yeah, it's a Canadian company. So Courtney got me these athletic pants. They're like jogger pants.
Let me pull them up here. And they are these single best pair of pants. I've ever owned. I'm going to say that.
Oh, man. I love these things. I can't, you can't get them off me. I'm just, I absolutely love these pants.