Synology BeeStation review: A great way to start getting real about backups

Dropbox is not backup. A portable hard drive is not backup. Real backup, experienced people have told me, starts with the 3-2-1 rule: three copies, two types of storage (or devices), and one copy is remote.

And yet my data backup system remains precarious. I have tried many schemes, ranging from “pay for Google Drive space and just dump it all there” to “multi-platform rsync/crontab-based headless system I try to build out with help from StackExchange.” I try not to be the person in an informercial, insisting that there must be a better way, but when it comes to backing up music, photos, cloud-based email and files, settings, and more, I am indeed that person. There has to be a better way, and it can’t just be the heavy lift of setting up a Synology NAS, right?

Well, what if Synology itself knew that not everybody is ready to become a self-employed, single-client junior sysadmin? That’s how I think about the BeeStation ($220 as of this writing). It’s just enough backup to be way better than what most people think of as backup (praying that a giant corporation never loses or closes their account), but it’s still just one device. It can also create a pretty smooth ascent to full-on NAS if this little taste of self-directed storage spurs your ambitions.

Synology’s primary pitch is that you can use BeeStation on "Your Personal Cloud Journey," with machine-learning object and face recognition sorting for photos and synced, versioned files for working. On this level, I’m not as impressed, though some people will likely appreciate these self-hosted alternatives to Drive, Dropbox, Google Photos, and iCloud more than I do. And they’re certainly a good way to get more use out of your backups.

The BeeStation’s best feature is how it makes good backup habits automatic. Within a couple of weeks of setting it up, I had both my and my spouse’s Drive and Dropbox accounts synced and regularly backed up; my older music, movie, and miscellaneous files stashed away; and our photos regularly backed up from our phones. All this was then backed up to Synology’s cloud servers every week (for an add-on cost), and everything was accessible remotely and on the local network.

Hardware

If you’ve ever owned a hard drive that rests inside a powered, external closure, you’ve had something similar to the BeeStation. It’s a black plastic box, it has one or two cables plugged into it, and it sits there and occasionally makes some spinning-up or access noises.

Not many noises, though, unless you’re doing a big backup or are using it as an ersatz Dropbox to work on files throughout the day. The BeeStation’s innards are full of heatsinks, passive cooling systems, and vibration dampers, and that design work has paid off. Compared to a (non-Synology) two-HDD-bay NAS system that my BeeStation ran next to, the BeeStation was relatively meek and serene.

Without having owned the device for a full three years’ warranty period, I can only speak to how little I noticed this object during a few months’ time in my office. Synology’s bee-themed branding is subtle, with just a quarter-sized logo imprint on each size. There’s a power light on the front to tell you it’s working, and plugs are in the back. The USB-A and USB-C ports are right next to each other, so if you’re using a particularly bulky thumb drive or cable head for either one, you might have to invest in adapters or short connection cables.

As for performance, that's not what this device is about. The Realtek chip inside will not be running Plex, a torrent downloader, or anything of the sort (nor does the OS support that). When I handed it my full 140GB (compressed) Google Photos export for importing into BeePhotos, it took an entire weekend for the system to decompress, analyze, and set them in place. Transferring files from a USB4 stick was as fast as I could imagine it being; while I’m sure the 1GB memory is a bottleneck, I only do this a few times a year. As with any other backup plan, you should only need to sync the new and changed files once the bulk is in place.

What you can sync and back up

On one level, the BeeStation is simply a 3.5TB drive, so you can back up whatever files you want to it through a USB-C cable or an external drive or over a network (via SMB or BeeStation software).

But the BeeStation wants to make certain things easier to back up. Those things are:

• Files from Google Drive, Dropbox, or Microsoft OneDrive, with both two-way or one-way (cloud to BeeStation) automatic sync
• Photos, both from Google or iCloud backups, folders or drives on desktops, and automatic phone-based uploads of new shots
• USB devices that you set up to automatically back up to BeeStation whenever plugged in
• Files from computer desktops, synced through BeeStation’s software or network connections (including SMB and Time Machine)

My favorite feature is the least sexy: the automatic USB drive dumping. It matches with my setting a quarterly (but actually twice-yearly) calendar reminder to grab backup exports from my web writing, social media networks, game saves, phones and tablets, and whatever else I’m ambitious enough to care about. I gather them on a computer, dump from that computer onto a big thumb drive, and then stick that thumb drive into the BeeStation. It beeps twice to let me know it’s doing its thing, and I can walk away.

Desktop, web, and BeeFiles software

The main way I’ve interfaced with the BeeStation is through its web interface. Simply type the BeeStation’s IP into your browser or use Synology’s servers to bridge you to your device. Synology really wants you to use its desktop and mobile apps for syncing, uploading, and viewing your stuff, but the BeeStation’s self-hosted web app might be enough for many people.

Through this browser interface, you can organize files, upload new files or folders, set up cloud file syncing (for Google Drive and the like), tag USB devices for auto-backup, and dig into more advanced settings. If you’re looking at a folder or list with a huge number of big files, you’ll feel the minimalist computer inside your drive chug to catch up. This is especially true when you’ve just given the BeeStation a bunch of photos to sort through; you’ll get a notification telling you this on mobile or desktop apps, too.

The desktop apps are meant to provide both easier file uploads and folder syncing, along with quick system tray access to the link where your BeeStation lives. They’re functional, and they’re both tempting me to drop my habit of syncing my desktop files to iCloud and OneDrive. I perennially run into storage overruns and sync issues with those services, such that there’s not much sense of security. With a BeeStation sync, I’m less likely to lose files, I’ll get multiple versions of each file (configurable in settings), and I might even recover some things I didn’t mean to delete when I get the clean-up impulse.

Even if you’re unlikely to use the desktop app long-term, it’s worth installing just for the initial photo backup dump. If you upload batches of photos at a time to the BeeStation from a computer, it can use that device’s far more robust resources to process them. As noted, the BeeStation itself will take a long time to process dozens or even hundreds of gigabytes of high-resolution photos.

The BeePhotos and “Your own cloud”

Using BeePhotos on an iPhone works, but I won’t be giving up Google Photos or the native Photos app any time soon. My main issue is with the browsing and scrolling experience in BeePhotos. Every time I head into a new section of the app or change from the Photos to Albums view, I see a grid of gray cubes that stick around for three to five seconds or so, until my little-server-that-could kicks out the thumbnails.

I understand the difference in scale between “Google’s globe-spanning dedicated servers” and “a single drive on my home network,” and the app generally seems to be caching (with adjustable storage limits) and improving its thumbnail views as I keep using it. But as a primary photo app that you use to search, scroll, or share, there’s always a slight hiccup, especially over a remote connection.

Sometimes it’s fine; its “Places” map of photo locations pans pretty smoothly and brings up images quickly. Sometimes it’s quite slow, like when I search “tree” in my photos and have to wait 60 seconds for nothing to come up. Again, your tolerance for local versus cloudy machine learning may well vary here, especially if you have lots of photos you don’t want to pay to store or share with Google’s powerful ad-funded servers.

The same goes for BeePhotos’ smart tagging of people, pets, and objects. BeePhotos found more than 50 versions of me within 20 years of photos, despite my never having visible facial hair and despite having a very small delta in hairstyles. The same went for my spouse and friends. You can work through it by finding and merging all the duplicates, but there’s plenty of room for growth in this app.

BeePhotos on a phone is still worth installing, however, just because it can back up new photos, sparing you the effort of regular export/import chores.

BeeFiles is a lot more straightforward, and it's seemingly more responsive. On the web, on a phone, or in the virtual folder on my desktop, I can check out all the files on my drive, including the stuff I synced from my computer desktops, Dropbox-style. BeeFiles can preview all the typical image, music, and document files or send them to other apps. It does what it says on the tin, and it does it pretty well.

Is BeeStation a good place to start down the path to NAS-dom?

The BeeStation’s main weakness comes if you use it regularly for more and more things. Can you upgrade it? With great effort, patience, and bravery, maybe, but officially, no. What you would do, in Synology’s thinking, is step up to one of the NAS systems the company has been crafting for more than 25 years, now perhaps a bit more prepared for it (and possibly having already backed everything up to Synology's cloud).

Otherwise, it’s hard to find fault in a device that finally got me to a reasonable state of data disaster preparedness. My photos now live on my phone, in Google Photos, on the BeeStation, and on Synology’s C2 cloud. My archive and working files exist on computers, various cloud services, and the BeeStation/C2 combo. That doesn’t have to be your chain; you could swap in “an external drive I keep off-site” for the C2 cloud, skip the cloud service syncing, and add all kinds of automated network transfers if you like. By automating backups from computers, phones, cloud services, and USB drives, the BeeStation is doing the heavy lifting, but you can still direct its efforts.

But the BeeStation has felt like the path of least resistance for what I want from an always-on, network-attached storage device. I know where I have to head next if I want to start serving up videos or music, run Docker containers, or the like. And while I'm likely to keep using Google Photos as yet another backup and photo search service, I'm glad to have something ready in case someone decides to put me out like Mat Honan. I don't know how huge the backup niche is between "Who cares?" and "Ready for the EMP," but I'm glad the BeeStation offers a space in there.

The good

• Auto-syncing of cloud accounts and USB drives removes grunt export/copy work
• Inoffensive black box is relatively quiet
• BeeFiles works fine as a self-controlled file sync tool
• BeePhotos, once set up, can save phone space and organize photos

The bad

• BeePhotos' face tagging and object recognition lag far behind bigger cloud services (if understandably)

The ugly

• Huge photo libraries take a very long time to process, especially if you don't use your own computers