Review on 💾 Diskless Synology DS218+ 2-bay NAS DiskStation by Cody Bowie

I rarely write reviews but this product delivers. I did a lot of research and figured this product would be the answer to my backup solution. All the research I did wasn't enough to draw my attention to the problems I was supposed to be encountering, because researching hardware doesn't give you clues about all the problems people have with software. When I started having problems and started looking for my problems, I found people who had these problems for more than 5 years and got almost no support from Synology. First, it's great hardware and was easy to install. It wasn't too difficult to get the DSM software to work. Installing the apps was very easy. Setting up user accounts and shared folders was a bit tricky, but still easy. Now the trouble begins. The cloud station software is some of the worst software I have ever come across. I can name at least 10 other sync software on the planet that got it right, the software was clearly poorly written. First, there's really no backup option, there's only two-way sync and only one download. For real? If you then connect a computer to the shared folder, it can take weeks for the files to load. The number of files is limited, which leads to a severe slowdown of the product, which is designed to store bulk backup data. If you are patient to upload the files to the NAS and then connect the second machine to a share where it contains an exact copy of the data (using the previous syncing solutions), you will have to wait another week for the second machine to check and restart everything, although they should be exactly the same. I finally managed to connect 2 machines to the share and keep them in sync. When I added a third machine, the Cloud Station software brought it to its knees. All of these machines are less than 3 years old and feature mid to high end hardware. When I paused or canceled the sync, the machine was up and running again. Start the cloud station and the machine will stop. You see, the software isn't smart enough to run in the background or idle. Then the next problem revealed it was an ugly head. The software got stuck on the file and kept trying to download it. Many internet sources say to uninstall and reinstall the software, others say to just delete the shared folder and recreate it. Yes, the synchronization took another 2 weeks. A few days later I found that one computer was not getting all the latest files. Yes, another known issue is that they just stop syncing even though the program says everything is fine. Again, the solution was to uninstall the software or stop syncing. To this day I still don't have 3 machines fully connected and in sync. But another problem has emerged. When I deleted the files on the computer I wanted to delete, I later came back and found that they had been downloaded again. It randomly downloads stuff that I know I'm deleting. I left the items in the cart for review. If you can take all this, now try to create a folder in a shared folder on one of the computers. The sync software is so ambitious that I can't get the folder name until it kicks me out of renaming and syncs it. I once tried renaming a folder three times before Windows Explorer crashed. Guys, this isn't the end of my troubles, but I'll leave it at that. The hardware is good but I plan to install other software. I regret going down this route as my old backup solution was a lot less painful.