I love my Synology NAS for so many different reasons. I also love my photos, documents, emails etc as I see them as part of my own history and my heritage. With so many different devices at home, Macbooks, Winbooks, mobile phones and online services its important to have a good strategy for backups.

I have a Synology DS916+ (the equivalent is this). It’s a 4 bay intel-based NAS. I have put three 4TB western digital disks in it. In the few years since I’ve had the Synology I’ve never has a drive fail and i run regularly consistency checks to verify that everything is ok (Synology is emailing with the results).

I run Docker on this Synology, and gradually I have migrating all the services and applications to different containers. Currently i only run Plex for all my family photos, family videos, and DVD backups, Jenkins for my builds and Portainer to manage the running containers.

I utilize my Synology for my time machine backups and I recently start thinking about using Gmvault for my email backups. I heavily using gmail as my main email (sorry Microsoft) as I was an early adopter and I have a lot of emails that I want to keep. As I was walking to the office one morning, I accidentally manage to delete all my emails. It took me a while to understand what has happened, however I was able to recover everything (apparently I am not the only one doing this, so gmail has a process for restoring everything

Since I like containerization of applications, and I also do not like to mess around my NAS operating system, I decided to run gmvault in a docker containeras well.