Can NAS power on and off at scheduled times? My mom's backup machine works 70 minutes a day, losing power by 8,300 hours a year

Last year, I moved my retired Synology DS220j to my mom's house to use it as a remote backup machine. Every day at 3:40 a.m., I ran rsync to sync the photos and document increments from home. I wrote about the full process in my about backing up remote locations. When configuring, I made a decision: turn off the hard drive into hibernation, so the drive wouldn't be still sleepy and unable to wake up when the task started.

I only carefully calculated the cost of the decision to

the dormant period recently. Plug the metering socket up: when the machine isn't working, it's twelve or thirteen watts, and the two plates buzz and spin. The task itself only needs a dozen minutes of daily increment, meaning the machine actually works for 20 minutes a day, with the remaining 23 hours and 40 minutes powered on and idle. Over the course of a year, out of 8,760 electrified hours, less than 130 hours actually work.

break down three key things: scheduled restart, scheduled shutdown, and scheduled power on/off

I found that this matter is especially easy to confuse with the other two matters, so I have to talk about them separately.

scheduled restart is the way to fix lag. I once wrote an article NAS whether to reboot regularly , and concluded that most legitimate NAS don't need to: rebooting interrupts seeding and backup windows, but the benefits are minimal. That article was about "stop messing around," which doesn't conflict with today's issue—today it's about getting a machine that shouldn't be online year-round to clock in and out on time.

only do scheduled shutdowns without scheduled startups, which is mediocre. The machine shut down at 4:30 a.m., and no one powered it on the next day. The backup stopped that very night. My mom couldn't possibly get up every morning to press the NAS power button. So the complete structure is an assembly line: scheduled startup, tasks running as usual, scheduled shutdown—three segments connected together to form a complete structure.

have another prerequisite: can you turn off your machine? My N100 Feiniu is the only one that can't be turned off—surveillance footage is written inside, qBittorrent is attached to the breeding , and the Jellyfin is ready to be filmed at any moment. The machines that can power on and off at scheduled times are those with a single role: pure backup machines, cold standby transfer stations, and occasionally powered on experimental machines. The DS220j is exactly the first of its kind.

Synology's power supply plan: one power on and one on off

Synology has made this feature available in the Hardware and Power → Power Planning tabs → the control panel. Click to create three types of plans: startup, shutdown, and restart. I built two of my mom's machines:

task itself is still the same as before, with the daily 03:40 rsync in the plan, and not a single line has been changed. The boot time doesn't follow the task settings: Synology is fully ready from power to DSM, starting at three to four minutes. Although the task plan will be rescheduled after the system starts, there may be some service delays. 20 minutes of margin, safe and reliable.

on the same page, there's another option in the "Power Recovery" tab: after a power outage, when power is restored, the machine is turned on, shut off, or restored to its previous state. I chose "Restore Previous State." The logic is simple—my mom's house tripped during the day, and when the power went out, the machine was already off. After the power came back, it stayed off and woke up by itself at 3:20 p.m. that night, so the backup was not delayed at all. If you choose "Always On," it will turn on and work until the next morning as soon as the power comes in, which is equivalent to 20 hours wasted. This option is the same idea as the self-starting power mentioned in the UPS article, but it's used for machines that mainly shut down, and the direction is reversed.

How to wake up after turning off the computer: Timed startup is the main route, WOL is just for show

timed power-on relies on the motherboard's RTC clock; when the device is powered off, it runs and powers on on itself when the time comes. This is the main circuit, no external devices. Even if my mom's house loses power and trips, it doesn't affect the next day's punctual wake-up time.

LAN Wake-up WOL is another way. Check "Enable LAN Wake-up" in the power recovery tab, send a magic packet to the network card, and the machine will wake up. I explained the principle in the of the remote boot article. But WOL has a weak spot: the device being sent has to be on the same network segment. There's no always-on device under my mom's router that can do this. If you want to power it on temporarily during the day and back it up, you have to call my mom to press the power button—you know how the old lady operates. So WOL is just for display at my mom's house. I hooked it up but rarely used it. If I really needed something, like running full load below, I'd just ask the machine not to turn off the machine the night before.

three pitfalls: power outages, full usage, and system updates. Don't worry about shutdown times

the assembly line runs up, there are three scenes that will muddy the water, and I've touched or rehearsed them all.

The first

is a power outage hitting the backup window. Last year, my mom's family tripped the switch once, and the backup silence failed for three nights before I realized it. This forced me to set up phone to alert . In the scheduled power-on version, these issues are even more hidden: the machine starts and shuts down on time, everything is "normal," but if the switch trips between 3:20 and 4:30, after the call comes and you press "restore previous state," it can still resume. But if the call comes past 4:30, the machine will sleep until the next day, and the backup will be empty that night. Whether it can be relied upon depends entirely on whether the alarm channel is still there—the email machine is also online at fixed times every day, so it must still be awake when the alarm is sent. I also moved the trigger time for the alarm task into the backup window.

second is full volume. The first 206GB full sync took two nights at the time, so a 70-minute window was out of the picture. The correct approach at this time is to plan the power supply: turn off the "shutdown" option, run the machine all night, and only activate it after it runs completely. Any major hourly work—full backup, major system version updates, RAID rebuild—falls into this category. Don't expect to be included in the daily window.

The third is to update without choosing the window to do it. When the DSM update notification popped up, I was itching to get my hands on it. At 4 a.m., the machine was on by itself, I clicked upgrade, and halfway through the upgrade, the shutdown plan triggered at 4:30 — I can't imagine that scene. Synology handles updates on its own before updating, but to be safe, system updates are left for manual startup users to do during the day, and the window only lets it back up one task.

electricity bill is a small ledger, while the hour the meter is powered on is a large ledger

settle accounts. Before the timer: 12.5 watts multiplied by 24 hours multiplied by 365 days, about 110 kWh, annual electricity cost about 60 yuan. After setting the timer: power on for 70 minutes daily, with 18W for startup plus backup read/write data, less than 8 kWh per year, costing 4 yuan. Saving over fifty yuan a year, enough for a good meal, but honestly, it's not enough to break even.

the real value is the life of those two 4T drives. The DS220j uses two old drives that have been used for five or six years for RAID1. The mechanical drive's lifespan is based on how many times the power is on. In the about hard drive failure, I wrote about how to read the Power_On_Hours in SMART. Previously, 8,760 hours of grinding in a year turned into 427 hours, so that's over 8,300 hours less in a year, essentially slowing down the old years of these two old properties. If the disk on the backup machine breaks, don't worry about the data—the main database is still there—but the money and time for disk replacement are still money, and if the remote backup fails, you'll be left bare.

take a seat with the same name: pure backup machine, cold standby transfer machine, experimental machine—just blindly go for this set; Whether you have surveillance footage, use a Home for seeding, run Assistant hub , or have family members always watching your library, don't turn off any of them. Stick to a 7x24 and set the hard drive sleep for the most practical way. My family now has two NAS, one and one around the clock, clockwise clock-in/out, each doing their own thing, no one holding up the other.

Here's a wrap-up

order: first confirm whether the machine role can be turned off, then set the power plan to start and shut down, set "Power Restore" to the previous state, and finally move the trigger time for the alarm task into the boot window. After completing these four steps, the machine goes from being available year-round to clocking in on time, saving about fifty yuan in electricity bills annually, and the lifespan of the unit doubles in profit.