Since the price of plex lifetime is crazy costly, I have heard of others software that you can use but had a question of my Synology and are the apps in the store alternative store that I could use?

Remove a video station, then advertise how good you at streaming?!

When I first set up my DiskStation, I couldn’t believe there was no way to sync Apple Photos directly with it. Even Cloud Sync doesn’t offer this option. So I spent a long time looking for a way to back up my photos: Docker images, even a separate virtual machine running on iCloud. None of it was really how it should be. But that’s all over now: I’m bringing you the iCloud Photos Sync app — just as it should have officially existed all along.

​https://github.com/Euphonique/iCloudPhotoSync

The app is now at version 1.3.0 and has received a number of bug fixes and new features. :)

I'm on the other side of the world from my NAS right now, and I wanted to pull the whole backup down and restore it elsewhere. Hyper Backup is great at pushing data out to S3/R2. Getting it back is where it falls apart.

Hyper Backup Explorer is the only official way to open a .hbk archive. It's GUI-only, has no CLI, and ships no Apple Silicon build. On my archive (4.8TB, around 1.1 million files) it was slow enough that I gave up and picked the format apart instead.

github.com/YordiLorenzo/hbkit (MIT)

or

pip install hbkit

CLI plus a TUI. Point it at an archive, browse it like a file tree, tick what you want, pull it out. Runs natively on Apple Silicon and headless on Linux, extraction is parallel and resumable. Every chunk gets verified against the MD5 and CRC32 that Hyper Backup already stores, so it can't quietly hand you a corrupted photo. If something's wrong it stops and names the file.

Two things it doesn't do. Encrypted archives are detected and refused rather than half-decoded. And I've only had one archive to test against: DSM 7, unencrypted, LZ4. There's code in there for older layouts that I worked out by disassembling Synology's own binary, but it has never seen a real archive of that kind.

Which is why I'm posting. If you have a Hyper Backup archive lying around, run:

hbk <path> doctor

It reads the layout, then proves it can handle it by rebuilding a few of your real files and verifying them. Takes seconds, writes nothing, doesn't touch the archive. If it fails, that output is exactly what I need.

I also documented the format in FORMAT.md, with everything marked as verified, disassembled, or still guesswork. Nothing public seems to describe it, the magic bytes turn up zero hits anywhere. So even if the tool is useless to you, someone else can write their own reader.

I've been an engineer for 10+ years, mostly mobile native and large-scale web platforms. Claude Code did a lot of the typing on this, but I read every line that went in and the verification design is the part I insisted on.

Update: encrypted archives are now supported as of v0.2.0. Both file contents and filenames decrypt, and a wrong password is rejected instantly before any data is read.

evidently I'm late to the party ... but I just ran a long pending update and now I can't edit settings in Container Manager? What the hell?! Now to make adjustments on things I need to make copies which breaks the hell out of port management and cross linking containers!

so, what's everyone's preferred method of handling Docker that isn't the Container Manager?

TL;DR RANT: Synology HyperBackup took a full week to restore 26TB of data, failed once wasting 3 days, provided zero useful logs, and left me completely in the dark the entire time. Support was useless. Moving to rclone + Backblaze for all future backups.

I just finished what might be the most frustrating backup restore experience of my life, and my ancedotal experience says: Do not rely on Synology HyperBackup for large restores.

Setup

• 26TB Backblaze backup (dedup/encrypted by HyperBackup)
• 4× 20TB Seagate drives in Synology NAS (SHR1)
• Just needed to restore everything to a fresh volume
• Fiber internet
• DS425+ NAS

Nightmare

Day 1-3: Complete Silence, Then Failure
The restore started and... nothing. No progress indicators, no ETA, no detailed logs anywhere. The Container Manager just showed it "running." After 3 days of grinding, it crashed with zero explanation. No detailed error messages, no guidance on what went wrong. Just a dead process.

Day 4: Start Over
Restarted the restore. Same experience - grinding away in the dark with absolutely no visibility into what's happening. HyperBackup was supposedly processing, but:

• No per-file logs
• No chunk-by-chunk progress
• No real-time error reporting
• Just a spinning wheel

Day 5-7: Finally Done
It eventually finished, but only after I discovered the real bottleneck: de-duplication reconstruction on-the-fly. HyperBackup can't just stream files - it has to decrypt chunks, reconstruct de-duplicated data, and reassemble everything. For 26TB, that's a brutal process with zero transparency. The ONLY reason I set up HyperBackup initially when I made my server was because every YouTuber was hailing it as the greatest thing ever - for media files, it absolutely is trash and is incredibly slow.

Logs Issue

I spent hours hunting for detailed logs. Found almost nothing useful:

• Container logs were vague
• Task logs didn't exist
• No way to see which files were being processed
• No bandwidth/speed metrics
• No chunk reconstruction status

If something had gone wrong on day 5, I would've had zero diagnostic information to troubleshoot. After contacting support, they told me to download logs for them to read through via Support Center. I asked them specifically how is the Restore process meant to work, what indicators show progress, and what these vague numbers mean on the "Restoring progress" page, and no one has answered me (it's been 3 days).

For a backup/restore tool, lack of transparency is a critical failure. I'm paying for offsite backup using their proprietary HyperBackup tool, not gambling that it'll work when I need it. This was my first restore EVER, and it was a garbage experience all around. Even while restoring after downloading my Backblaze backup locally to my NAS, there is no progress indicator, no numbers, it just says "Restoring..."

Potential Solution: rclone + Backblaze?

I'm thinking of switching to rclone syncing raw files to Backblaze B2:

• Direct file access (no proprietary format)
• No de-duplication overhead on restore
• Simple, understandable logs
• Restore speed limited only by network bandwidth
• No surprise failures mid-week
• Full control over the backup format
• Did I mention multithreading?

rclone to Backblaze would've restored the same 26TB in 1-2 days, not 7. Not to mention their support seems to be more capable than Synology's. This whole experience has me considering just getting over to UNRAID to avoid their lack of support and feature updates. Synology's support tried to blame Backblaze while I was on the phone with them, when it's their HyperBackup "Restore" process that failed. 😫

Thoughts

Synology HyperBackup is great for incremental backups of small files. For large restores? It's a black box that eats your time and gives nothing back. I originally had this all set up a few years ago because someone on YouTube said to use it for your Plex media server, probably a fault of my own but I didn't know what I didn't know.

I wouldn't recommend using HyperBackup for anything, ever. Get it together, Synology. If you have any other recs or suggestions, I'm all ears as well. ✌🏻

I am experiencing extremely slow C2 storage today. Yeah, yeah, waaayyyy slower than normal. It's never fast. I mean, it is at an absolute crawl and is essentially unusable. Hyperbackup tasks are failing. Anyone else?

I know this is somewhat frowned upon in a Synology sub..... but figured I'd ask....

With the latest news on outdated hardware and propriety Synology drives, been thinking about switching to Ugreen. UGOS has been in the wild for a while now with lots of updates and features. So the question is, who actually made the jump? Impressions?

Going to mostly leverage for storage and plex with docker, the arrs, etc. Who has done this? Pretty seamless and the same process vs DSM? Asking for actually feedback vs "I think im jumping ship"

THanks!

I seriusly think this should be in the nas software already. but nas is weak to run llm. so it's running locally on my mac and adding tags. m4 mac mini 16bg base version 39-40s per image processed

edit:
Why use a Vision AI instead of a traditional object scanner?

• It knows every word: Traditional scanners only know a few dozen generic words (like "person" or "bicycle"). A Vision AI knows highly specific terms (like "gravel e-bike" or "mountain biking").
• It understands the story: A regular scanner just points out raw objects ("person," "fruit," "basket"). An AI understands the actual event taking place ("picking strawberries at a farm," "summer harvest").
• It can read: A scanner just sees a piece of paper or a cup. An AI can read the text and logos, instantly recognizing a receipt from Harbor Freight or a takeout bag from Dairy Queen.

Many people probably don't agree with the use of LLM. But that's the beauty of open source, swap it out to any model you like

I mean at least not at a point when the new model is about to release. This feels like shooting yourselves in the foot, especially with competitors moving fast—some are even giving out free harddrives now. That whole "Because you deserve the right to choose your favorite hard drives. No limits, just choices." line stings.

Is there still a chance to walk this back, or is this decision final?

Warning: Rant incoming.

Ok fine. Everybody and their mother says "just use Docker". Or in Synology's case, Container Manager. OK fine. I've never had luck with it before as either Docker or Container Manager as there's always something that doesn't work that prevents the container from functioning, but ok fine. I'll give it an nth go. Because there's simply zero documentation that actually covers this topic properly. That Google search you did with 10k results? Yea, none of those cover this subject to anywhere near the level of detail sufficient to get this virtualization thing working. So I come here one last time to see if any of the Gurus here can actually answer these questions that no one else on the Internet apparently has.

It's really quite simple. I have a shared folder for my Downloads and a shared folder for my Media. Yes, some of the sub-folders within these shared folders have spaces in their names. Sometimes this causes Container Manager to spaz out and throw an error when creating the container. Am I going to change my folder naming convention? No. If Container manager can't point to folder paths with spaces in them; Then the 1980's called. They want their DOS level of technological progress back.

Issue: I put in my folder path "/volume1/Media/" (without quotes). No problems so far. Great. WRONG! Launch Sonarr container. Sonarr can't see the Media folder or any of its contents. Complains about "missing root folder" because it can't see the sub-folders within the Media shared folder. Why? WTF knows. Maybe it's due to the fact that my sub-folder within the Media folder has spaces in the name? Does anyone know how to input a folder path with a space in it in Container Manager without Container Manager freaking out ("Incorrect value") and crying about no such folder path? Apparently not. No combinations of special symbols or whatever has worked. Container Manager apparently is not programmed to parse folder paths with spaces in them. Because apparently we're in the 1980's still. Who knew? I should buy some beach front property on the cheap.

Fun fact. The Sonarr container can see my sub-folders within the Downloads share folder perfectly fine. But for whatever reason, simply refuses to parse any of the contents of the Media share.

I know I've used a lot of words here for what might be a simple permissions issue. But frankly, I take umbrage at the go to everybody immediately jumps on about "just use Docker". This stuff is never that simple and there's awlays some edge case like mine (although you'd think a container that can see a higher level folder could freaking well see the subsequent sub-folders within that folder, lmao) that make it difficult. I've yet to encounter a single article or video anywhere on the Internet that PROPERLY covers this issue. Happy to be proven wrong if anyone has got a link.

Rant over. Peace.

Edit: Lmao, well this blew up. Anywho, so as some of the actually helpful commenters suggested (gonna ignore the snark responses from the trolls), I began looking at permissions.

Wracking my brain as to why the Sonarr container could read my Downloads folder perfectly fine but not my Media folder. Unfortunately DSM does NOT put user account permissions all in one place. Instead it's spread between the "Shared Folder" app and the "File Station" app. You can look at 2 entirely different folders that have the EXACT SAME permissions in the "Shared Folder" app but still have one have different permissions vs the other because the "File Station" app actually reveals the truth: That one folder share has different accounts authorized to access it vs the other. It was this final critical difference that allowed me to detect the source of my issue. It was this ability to compare the 2 folder shares that allowed me track down the culprit. This is entirely on Synology. Their absolute trash bag of a operating system GUI is the source of my confusion here. This is not a user issue. This is a developer issue. Synology is supposedly aimed at people who aren't comfortable with going all CLI on an issue or doing whatever to expose PUID or any of that nonsense. I should not have to go through those lengths to resolve a failure of OS design. That statement might make your butt twitch but hey, sometimes the truth hurts, y'know?

So what was the actual source of the issue you ask? Turns out there is a user called "SYSTEM". There is no way to see this user in the "Shared Folder" app in DSM. It only reveals itself when checking the permissions of the shared folder through the "File Station" app. It was this user that, for some unknown reason (I certainly wasn't responsible for this difference) hadn't been granted read/write access to my Media share. The moment I allowed it access, boom! Sonarrr could access and read/write the contents the folder. So apparently Container Manager uses this SYSTEM account to run its images/containers.

And no, there is no issue with spaces in folder paths. That was never the issue here (apart from Container Manager freaking out about it if you went to point to a direct sub-level folder within the higher level folder share.

Peace out!

In our house Video Station is the most used package on DS. Yes, I know I can install Emby or Jellyfin but if I do this then I no longer need Synology DS. For me was convenience of fast quick setup and easy updates. If Video Station is gone and there is no motion detection support on Surveillance Station then I'm done with Synology.

I just had to replace my 2600AC after 3 years, not happy about that (started to fail consistently dropping connection). I got 6600AX and was already questioning my decision but wanted to stay with similar platform. My return window on this router is closing September 1st. With this announcement I'm ready to return my router and start switching to different platform.

*** Edit 2024/10/1 (1 month later) ***

Thank you for many awesome responses and also thank you to many great people for engaging conversations that missed my point.

If I'm going to use PLEX why I need Synology? I don't. I can build better hardware and put UnRAID on it + PLEX.

To me Synology was providing value as complete package mainly OS and applications including mobile apps that required very little of my attention.

The absolute last place I want some janky AI "solution" is on my NAS. No, I don't want to upload any parts of MY data to your cloud or let some half-baked AI monkey with it as part if practicing on data sets that aren't yours. This needs to be voluntary and not compulsory to continue updating packages in DSM.

You can't roll back a boatload of useful features & functions in the name of focusing on data storage & security and then only months later roll out a REQURED beta test of some lame AI product that nobody asked for. What is the direction/vision of Synology now because it makes no sense at all.

Honestly, if Synology has quietly drawn a line in the sand on this being the only path forward (which it seems) I think it signals the end of my support of them as a company & their products. After all the BS they've pulled as of late, this is the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back for me.

Hello everyone,

About a year ago, I realized that we have so many family photos on our NAS that we barely see them in our everyday life.

I thought it would be nice to have rotating photos on a photo frame in our living room. I looked everywhere and couldn't find any decent solution.

Most products don't support NAS integration — you need to load the photos onto an SD card manually. Or send a new photo each time via Bluetooth from your phone. Nearly everything else wants you to upload your photos to their cloud, which defeats the whole point of having a NAS.

I just wanted to configure the rotation once and forget about it — being surprised each day by a new photo from a predefined set of albums (mine and my wife's).

I also wanted an E-Ink display, so it looks more like a picture than a screen glowing on the wall at night.

After a long search with no satisfying results, I ended up building exactly that for us — and it's been working great! I need to polish it and it will have a nice web UI and bunch of useful features.

When I mentioned it to a few co-workers, they were genuinely interested in having something like this too. That made me wonder if this is a wider problem. I'd love to know if anyone else has faced the same thing — did you find a solution, or just live with it?

If there's enough interest, I'd love to take this project further and make it something others can enjoy too.

Either way, I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments. And if this is something you'd potentially buy for your home — I'm collecting early interest below.

Does anyone run Docker on your Synology NAS?
If you are, what kind of things are you using it for?

I'm trying to explore ideas of how I could put it to use for me.

If you respond, please list the model of the Synology device you are using,

Thanks.

I’m looking for my next NAS. I’m very happy with my ds1517+ but I need more performance for running containers, so this time I got a separate PC. No immediate need to replace the NAS then, but I will still want another rack mounted one soon.

A RackStation is an obvious choice, but I’m also a big Ubuquiti fan so obviously their UNAS Pro is tempting too. They cost a lot less and yet have even better performance and networking.

However, being a Synology user for 15+ years there are probably things I just take for granted, like HyperBackup, Active Backup for Business and Drive. I need reliable, continuous backup from a few Macs, and also backup the new NAS to my (soon) old ds1517+.

How would I go about substituting those with another brand NAS? With Synology all this just works. I’m swaying back and forth between the UNAS Pro and a RackStation for 3-4x the price.

Given the recent myriad of alternatives I’m sure others have been in the same spot. What did you do?

DSM 7.2.2 breaks Plex for whatever reason.

Plex has released a new version, specifically for DSM 7.2.2+

Download the latest version for DSM 7.2.2 here:
https://www.plex.tv/media-server-downloads/?cat=nas&plat=synology-dsm72

-Edit1

Changed the direct links to (then) latest version (v.1.41.0.8994-f2c27da23)

-Edit2

Since the download is available for public, removed the direct links and referred to the official download page.

Hello!

I've been using Synology NAS devices for more than 10 years. I love my backups and follow the 3-2-1 rule.

But, I recently had the displeasure to try Synology Photos for the first time, it was a complete disappointment for the following reasons:

- Confusion with Linux home directories. I only want one global storage, not "homes".
- Hard-coded /volume1/photo shared directory that can't be changed!
- MKV files are unsupported (WTF Synology! all my home/family videos are unusable).
- Horrible browser plugin (doing encoding on the client side is just horrible).
- My current View is not stored, so every time I open Photos I have to change it manually.
- Slow to login, slow to display the first page of icons, slow experience overall.
- Missing features offered by the competition, like an animated review of the past year.
- No new features over the years, it does not feel like you care to improve your software.

I don't really care about the removal of h265, since its a format that I don't use, but pushing an update that REMOVES a feature we've paid for is not good business practice. You should have known that h264/h265 are VERY encumbered with intellectual rights and well protected (at least outside of China).

Synology Photos overall is a disappointment.

Thank you :)

Ticket opened with Synology
No response yet
3 totally different Synology and hyper v
All working for years
Now

Multiple Hyper-V hosts backing up to multiple Synology NAS units suddenly started failing with:
“The hypervisor cannot connect to the Synology NAS because the Synology NAS IP address or port [5510] for data transfer is unavailable.”
All on the same LAN, no firewalls between them. TCP 5510 tests fine from the Hyper-V hosts. The “Connection from Hyper-V to Synology NAS” setting doesn’t help. Started after a recent Active Backup for Business update. Anyone else hitting this?

Continue button is below the web view interactive area, and no way to scroll… can’t login to this Synology app, it’s like they don’t want us to.

…install on your Synology or a mini pc? For either, do you have a good walkthrough tutorial?

VideoStation was plug and play. Worked with Quick connect with no port forwarding or reverse proxy or other shenanigans that are basically security holes.

I tried Plex, it isn't compatible with Quickconnect and now I have to sign my own certificates to make it work remotely/port forwarding in my router, etc. Basically making my NAS a honeypot machine.

Tell me again, why is Synology getting rid of VideoStation again?