How to back up with Synology Hyper Backup? Plug in an external hard drive, and accidentally deleted folders can be restored to last week's version

last month, my cousin's four-drive Synology lost a drive. RAID1 held up without losing data, but he was scared awake—the disc can be bought again, but the photos my family had saved over the years are really gone. After half a month of shouting 'I'll back up later,' I just didn't do anything. In the end, I couldn't stand it anymore and had him buy a 2TB external hard drive for 279 yuan. On the day the package arrived, I came to my door to get it, using Synology's built-in Hyper Backup, with no third-party devices installed. After configuring it, I had him delete a folder on the spot and retrieve it from the backup. Only after this trip did he truly understand how this thing differs from "copying files to an external hard drive."

Let me be clear first: copying directly to an external hard drive isn't called backup

cousin's original plan was very simple: drag the entire photo folder onto the external hard drive over the weekend, and done. This is the first reaction of ninety percent of people, and it's also the trick that most easily spoils the dish. The copy you copy in will always be in this state of "today." On Monday, I accidentally deleted the folder, and on Tuesday I remembered to check the external hard drive—the drive was copied last Sunday, and all the newly photographed photos from the past two days were gone. If you copy and then clean the NAS as well, those two sources will be left with only one copy left, and neither can save the other.

I suffered this loss myself. Two NAS devices at home are synchronized using rsync. Synchronization means both sides look exactly the same: one end deletes, the other ends delete. Once, I accidentally deleted a 40GB folder, and that 'backup machine' on the other side faithfully synced the error that night. If it weren't for Btrfs taking a quick snapshot, those files would have been lost. I wrote about this in my post two NAS backups remotely. Simply put, synchronization is like a mirror; yesterday will never be reflected in the mirror.

Hyper Backup does something else: each backup saves a "save point," and each save point is independent of each other. Last Thursday you saved one file, today you saved another, you deleted the file on the NAS, but last Thursday's save didn't budge at all. It's not just about preventing market failures, but also about your own slipped hands—and honestly, the number of slips is far greater than the number of times your hand is broken. RAID management drives fail and cannot be managed and accidentally deleted. How to back up this account safely That post already calculated that my cousin's RAID1 machine still ran naked for a month.

Step 1: Choose the right external hard drive—don't get hung up on the format

are divided into two categories. 2.5-inch laptop mechanical drives or solid-state external drives can be operated directly via USB ports, ready to use as soon as plugged in; A 3.5-inch desktop drive must come with a dedicated 12V power enclosure. Relying solely on the current from the USB port isn't enough, and the unstable power supply is a problem I plugging in a portable hard drive into the NAS. I've reviewed the article about and always look for boxes with power adapters before buying. My cousin has about 180GB of data, so I told him to go straight for 2TB. It's more than enough to fit the data itself, but you also need to leave room for future versions—the experience value starts at 1.5 times the backup data volume.

No need to worry about

format. Synology recognizes external drives like Btrfs, ext4, NTFS, and exFAT, so there's no barrier to writing Hyper Backup inside. One thing to note: the content written in the backup is its own dedicated format; the disk format itself doesn't really matter. The real consideration is only when you want to use the drive to do other tasks on your Windows computer.

Create the first task: from the plus sign to the run, five steps

Hyper Backup is pre-installed in the

DSM7; just glance at the kit center and open it directly. Step one: Click the "+" in the lower left corner, select "Data Backup Task." The newer firmware line is called "Folder and Software Package," which are the same thing. Step two: Select the destination type as "Local Folder and USB." The plugged external hard drive will be listed. Select it and let it automatically create a backup directory on the drive. Step 3: Check the shared folder you want to prepare. My cousin's house checked both the photo and family documents folders, but I didn't let them check any movie download folders—those things break and can be reinstalled, and keeping them is just a waste. Step four: schedule every day, set the time at 3:30 a.m., when no one is using the NAS and the hard drive is idle. Step 5: In the backup settings, check "Enable transfer encryption" and click Done. It will start running the first full data automatically.

the first full dose is the slowest of all. My cousin's 180GB drive, 2.5-inch USB 3.0 drive was about 90MB/s in actual tests, and it took nearly forty minutes. From now on, only the changes are sent at midnight every day. The auto-backup of photos on his phone costs only one or two GB per day, and the increase only takes two or three minutes. You sleep, you sleep, and it does its job.

version retention policy, don't copy the default values

After finishing

quest, there's a spot worth checking out: how to keep the version. The default mode is customizable, with up to 32 versions. Sounds like a lot, but counting on fingers—one version per day, 32 versions means over a month, and it doesn't remember a world from a month ago. If you had changed a document and tried to look like it was three months ago, it wouldn't have worked.

switching to "Smart Version Reserve" is much more flexible; it automatically sparses based on time and distance:

cousin's daily backup schedule actually is: for the past month, there are files to review every day; before that, one every week; before that, one every month. It still remembers everything from a year ago for you. Moreover, Hyper Backup is incremental and deduplicated. The same file is only saved in one copy out of thirty versions, and only new blocks are added when changed—my cousin's 180GB saved for about a month, but the disk only took up a little over 190GB, not the intimidating 180 times thirty files. Removing duplicates saves the unchanged parts. For photos that have already been pressed, don't expect to shrink them further.

Restoration Practice: I Asked My Cousin to Delete a Folder

the day I finished editing, I asked my cousin to delete the entire folder of "2021 Old Photos" and empty the recycle bin, creating a classic accidental deletion incident. Then, in Hyper Backup, click the restore icon in the lower left corner, select "Data," and a version tree will appear in the middle of the interface. Rewind the time to the previous version, and below is the complete directory structure backed up that day. Check "2021 old photos," choose to restore to original location, and within minutes, the folder is back to normal, with no change in the photo modification dates. Compared to the snapshots in the 'Accidental Deletion Self-Rescue' , this one doesn't require any file systems or commands—just press the remote all the way down.

there's an even easier trick: unplug the external hard drive and plug it into your computer, install Synology's official free Hyper Backup Explorer, open the .hbk file on the drive, use the graphical interface to browse the directory, right-click and export whichever file you find, and the NAS doesn't even need to turn on. This trick is perfect when the NAS is completely in trouble—the machine is gone, the backup drive is still there, and the data remains.

three pitfalls mentioned in advance, here's a checklist

pitfall one: the backup drive does not show the actual photo. Hyper Backup writes to the disk in its own dedicated format. When you dig in the file manager, you'll only find a lump of directories you can't understand. If you want to dig up content, use the Explorer mentioned above. Don't be reckless in deleting anything inside—deleting a single block could ruin the entire version. Pitfall 2: It's normal to be slow the first time. Don't be fooled by the slow progress bar—just start over and start over from the beginning. Pitfall three, and the easiest to let go of: the drive is always stuck on the NAS, which gets struck by lightning or is blackmailed. This drive lives and dies together. Truly valuable photos, then archive them on a cold storage drive every few months. I wrote about this in the cold backup article. The two sets complement each other, not just choose one or the other.

one more thing to clarify the boundary: Hyper Backup is for the folder level, managing "the historical versions of a certain folder." If you want to mirror the whole computer along with the system, you need to use another Active Backup set from Synology. I wrote about how to set up a for system backup—one manages files, the other manages the whole system. Many people run both.

Here's a wrap-up in

order: buy the disk to get the capacity × 1.5, set up the task in five steps, keep the version and switch to a smart file, then do a deletion and recovery drill in front of your family—don't skip this step; only press the restore button for the first time when something really happens, your hands will shake. My cousin now brags to everyone that he can retrieve last month's photos, even though I forced him to delete that folder.