Using Synology Active Backup for Business on our Microsoft 365 data – It did everything we needed, and more

Synology recently sent us a DiskStation 923+ NAS device to test its Active Backup for Business solution.

• Click to learn more about Synology Active Backup for Business.

We’ve reviewed several of their NAS devices over the years and they never disappoint. In fact, our multimedia team uses a Synology NAS to backup all their video files.

The DiskStation 923+ is, unsurprisingly, a great piece of hardware – supporting up to 50TB of storage, 10GbE, and dual NVMe drives.

Synology also sent through resources that showed how easy it is to use Synology Active Backup for Business, which we tested – and were extremely impressed.

Active Backup for Business

Active Backup for Business runs on Synology’s award-winning DSM operating system and supports virtual machines, physical servers, file servers, PCs, and much more.

Among its most impressive features are:

• Unlimited backups.
• Backup replication to an offsite NAS for added redundancy.
• Incremental backup functionality.
• Data deduplication.

Data deduplication is a particularly welcome feature that we have often found to be lacking in other backup solutions.

When data is duplicated, it wastes valuable storage space.

Another tool that we really appreciated was the Active Backup for Business Agent – which enables mass deployment on employee devices.

Any IT professional who has performed manual application installations on many devices will know how painful this can be, and having a tool that performs this hard work for you is great.

Active Backup for Microsoft 365

We were particularly interested in the SaaS backup capabilities of Active Backup for Business, and tested this with Microsoft 365.

First, we downloaded the Active Backup for Microsoft 365 package, entered our Synology account details, and everything was then ready to go.

To perform a backup, we navigated to the Task List tab and clicked on create, where we were greeted by a task creation wizard.

Here are the highlights of this process.

• Linking our NAS to Microsoft 365 was as simple as setting a certificate password for authentication, signing into Microsoft 365 as an admin, and accepting the permission request.
• Configuring the backup task involves entering your chosen task name, choosing a backup destination, and setting your backup list.
• You can back up everything, or manually choose between different users and applications.
• You must enable “Enable Active Backup for Microsoft 365 Portal” if you want to support restorations.
• Auto-discovery is available for new users, groups, sites, and teams – saving you tons of time.
• There are three backup policies: continuous backup, manual backup, and scheduled backup.
• You can keep backups permanently, or delete them after a certain number of days.

Thanks to the seamless task creation wizard, it took minutes to set up our backup schedule.

Restoration

The Active Backup for Microsoft 365 Portal can be used to restore your backup task data if an employee loses important files.

First, you must use the portal’s “View Role” drop-down menu to search for specific users.

Once you’ve chosen the user(s) you want to include in the restoration, select the backup task you want to restore from, as well as the service the data is from – such as Teams, Mail, or Contacts.

We could then search for specific content using the search function – and there was even a timeline function, allowing us to restore older backups from specific dates.

This is a gamechanger, as it protects you if a file was deleted in the past and the employee has only discovered this recently.

Once we had chosen the files we wanted to restore, we clicked on either the restore button to restore the file to the original user, or the export button to save it on our own device.

Both methods worked instantly.

Final thoughts

Using Synology Active Backup was incredibly easy and its interface’s user experience is unrivalled – to the point where non-IT staff could easily work out how to use it.

In fact, there is support for non-administrators having access the Active Backup for Business Portal to recover their own files.

Giving staff this ability, but without the ability to fiddle with the backup task itself, takes a significant workload off of IT staff.

Between this and the other exceptional features we’ve mentioned, we thoroughly recommend trying out Active Backup for Business for your SaaS installations.

Click to learn more about Synology Active Backup for Business.