Synology C2 Backup for Business Review

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Last year, I reviewed Synology’s Active Backup for Office 365 which is a cheap way of keeping another copy of Microsoft cloud data, as long as you have enough disks and space to fit it on.

This time, I’m looking at their Synology C2 | C2 Backup solution for businesses – which has a 90 day free trial (credit card details not required). This is a cloud based backup service – so no hardware required. Their support for Microsoft 365 data is quite new, and right now will cover user Exchange Online mailboxes, with OneDrive support coming in Q2 2022. Synology asked me to look at this and answered a few questions around timeframes; they’ve previously given me hardware to review, but this is not paid for content.

C2 Backup is one part of the C2 offerings, but you can pick and choose which components you want without requiring the others:

C2 Password
C2 Backup
C2 Transfer
C2 Identity
C2 Storage

At the time of writing, Synology have 3 regions you can choose from for C2 Backup: Europe – Frankfurt, North America – Seattle, and APAC – Taiwan. I’ll run through setting this up while giving a bit more information around what it is.

After creating an account, the first step is to pick your subscription – Monthly or Annual. The rates (which I won’t quote here in case they change, go have a look on their website) is per month and per terabyte, with the minimum at 5TB and the maximum 200TB.

I will note that there is an individual option that works a bit differently, but won’t run through that in this article. The data limits are smaller at 500GB, 2TB or 5TB and I’m sure there are other differences in the service vs the business option.

Next is setting up your domain, which will be a subdomain of c2.tw. You can’t change this later!

As I’m just doing a trial, I’ll skip the payment information, but it warns:

Continue without setting up a payment method? If you do not set up a payment method before the end of your free trial period, your subscription will not be automatically renewed.

Next is setting up the C2 Encryption key. This is like your password, but to all the data the service will hold. Synology point out they don’t store this – so you need to secure it yourself. If you lose it, you can’t decrypt your data and nor can Synology. They do provide a recovery code once this is done, which again you’ll need to keep – think of it as a backup password. This will be prompted to download a txt file containing the recovery code onto your computer.

Next is choosing the source of the data you want to back up. This screen will just jump you to the page for either – you’re not making a single choice between the two – it can do both.

Briefly looking at the On-premises device option, there’s 2 types of backup it can do: Personal Computer or Physical Server. There’s also Backup Policy where you can set the backup rules such as frequency, schedule and scope.

Backing up a computer or server will require an agent to be installed and signed into. Once done, a Backup Policy needs to be configured so the C2 platform knows what to backup and when. The policies are pretty simple, and the default policy will just back up everything daily, and keep all versions forever.

On the Cloud side of backup sources, we have support for Microsoft 365. You’ll need to sign in with an account that can grant access to certain areas of Microsoft 365.

It will need a little bit of time to connect before you can start configuring (about 30 seconds wait for me).

The next screen lets you pick which users to back up – which will most likely be all of them.

You don’t have to worry about adding future users in manually, there’s an option for Auto-Protection which will detect new users daily and just add them in. Note the 250 user maximum on this.

Once done, you’ll see the list of users you chose with the status ‘Not backed up yet’. You can trigger a backup now through the ellipsis button rather than waiting for the daily cycle.

The first backup will probably take quite a while – but after that first one is complete, future backups are incremental so will run a lot quicker.

The recovery portal is viewed in a per user state, you can choose which version you want to browse through (by date), and search if you’re looking for something in particular.

When restoring emails, you can either choose the emails you want to restore, or just restore everything. For specific emails, you can choose where to restore (either where they came from, or in a different restore folder) and if you want to overwrite existing items or not (only when restoring to original folder).

Restoring a single email for me only took a few seconds. Searching for emails was also very quick, with results coming up within a few seconds again.

Leaving the service going for a week, it has backed up successfully each time, and I can wind back to the daily versions for mailbox content with ease:

It also provides self-service restoration portal where end users can browse backups and recover files by themselves.

I’ve reviewed and tested a few other backup solutions; this is one of the easiest to do out there, but I’m also hanging out for some of the features still on the roadmap. If you only care about emails via Exchange Online, then the platform is ready to go.

It will be interesting to see how far Synology takes their C2 Backup service; being quite new I’m impressed that they’ve got the most important items (emails) backing up reliably, with a simple to restore process. If you’re looking for a ‘forever’ copy of everything in a mailbox on a daily basis, this is worth checking out.

My Windows 11 List Of Demands

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Windows 11 is a nice visual refresh to the Windows line of Operating Systems. However, there has been a simplifying and removal of many useful functions; usually these are just hidden behind more clicks, which leaves are more frustrating experience when we’ve become used to a certain way of doing things.

In no particular order, here’s the bug bears I’ve found so far in using Windows 11, and if I’ve found a fix/workaround/setting change:

Start button Location Moved to Middle

The Start Button is in the centre of the screen by default – breaking what we’ve been doing constantly since Windows 95. This change seems unnecessary and even on my 44″ Ultrawide monitor, I’d rather it in the bottom left. I tried leaving it in the middle but gave up after a week.

You can change this back to the left side by:
Click ‘Start’ > ‘Settings’ (if you don’t see it, type it)
Click ‘Personalisation’ > Taskbar (not Start, where you’d expect it!)
Click ‘Taskbar behaviours’ to expand it.
Under Taskbar alignment, change the dropdown from ‘Center’ to ‘Left’

Task Manager missing from right click on taskbar

Task Manager has grown into a much more useful tool since Windows 10, beyond just killing off programs; it provides a bunch more visibility into what your computer is actually doing. For some reason, being able to access it via a right click on the taskbar has been removed.

Ctrl + Shift + Esc will still bring up Task Manager, but it’s one of the more awkward key combos. Right clicking on the Start button itself will bring up a very useful menu (as it does on Windows 10), with one of the options still brining up Task Manager.

The new way I’ll probably try to teach myself to bring up Task Manager is, Winkey + X > T.

‘Edit’ option missing from File Explorer right click (and others)

If you have a look at the right click menu against a file in File Explorer, it will be a much shorter list than what you’re used to. Several common functions (cut, copy, rename, share, delete) are icons at the top, but everything else that didn’t make the ‘cut’ is in the ‘Show more options’ menu, which takes you back to the classic looking right click menu.

As Nathan McNulty pointed out, this can be restored to the old ways via a reg setting (run in PowerShell):

New-Item -Path "HKCU:\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32" -Value "" -Force

or via Command Prompt:

reg.exe add "HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32" /f /ve

File Explorer Command Bar Simplified

File Explorer had a bunch of useful options in the top Command Bar. They’ve mostly been removed (seeing a trend here?) to simplify and show only a few options. The idea of tabbed menus is completely gone. Some options like ‘Map network drive’ are in an ellipsis menu

PowerShell:

New-Item -Path "HKCU:\Software\Classes\CLSID\{d93ed569-3b3e-4bff-8355-3c44f6a52bb5}\InprocServer32" -Value "" -Force

Command Prompt:

reg.exe add "HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID\{d93ed569-3b3e-4bff-8355-3c44f6a52bb5}\InprocServer32" /f /ve

Show all icons in Notification Area

Those little icons in the bottom right side of the taskbar – that’s the notification area. I like seeing them all, rather than having them hidden in a submenu. Windows 10 has an option to ‘Always show all icons in the notification area’. In Windows 11, this option isn’t available. I did learn that rather than mucking around with settings, you can just drag an icon out of the menu and pop them straight onto the notification area – but you shouldn’t have to do this for each icon.

Programs in Task Bar don’t expand out

In Windows 10, I’m used to having a reasonable sized bar for each program I have open. It shows the Icon and a bit of text to help identify what the program is (or in the case of Microsft Edge, which profile/web page for those untabbed). It’s great, it uses up all that task bar space. The second monitor does have a consolidated view, but I drive which program I want by clicking in the primary task bar.

Windows 11’s design is to remove that, and have all taskbar programs just show the icon. For pinned programs, you’ll need to look for a blue line/dot below the icon, to indicate a window is open. Multiple windows of File Explorer open? They’re consolidated into the one icon, you’ll need to hover over that and pick the one you want.

This one isn’t possible to restore natively, and there’s a lot of feedback about people wanting it.

Widgets

Widgets are back again (I actually liked them in Vista) except this time, Widgets is a popout menu triggered by a button in the Task Bar (although checking an Insider’s build, this looks like it will change to a weather button in the bottom left). The Widgets popout menu then contains a bunch of sections around news, weather, stocks, eSports, Traffic and so on.

It’s abilit to remember what I actually like or don’t like seems non existent. I’ve removed ‘NBA’ that many times – and yes, I am signing into Widgets with the same account, and on Windows 10 the News and Interests button works the same way). It’s a very US centric service – and only has configuration around 3 Australian Cities (Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne). There’s a web search function, which of course only uses Bing. Although I like seeing the temperature, if you want to turn off Widgets:

Click ‘Start’ > ‘Settings’ (if you don’t see it, type it)
Click ‘Personalisation’ > Taskbar
Under ‘Taskbar items’ turn the switch ‘off’ for Widgets.

I’m sure there are a bunch of other frustrations in the simplification of Windows 11, as I’m sure the idea is that there’s too many buttons and options for a ‘regular’ user, so the idea is to clean it all up. The problem is that for many people used to these options, it feels like a step back.

Maybe the approach Microsoft should take is to have Windows 11 ‘Basic Mode’ and ‘Advanced Mode’ to try and keep everyone happy?

There are some good features in Windows 11 too, such as Snap Layouts / Snap Groups, where you can pick the size of the window to fill in your sceen – handy on an ultrawide, where you want to move a window to the right third of the screen. There’s also the whole Android app support that’s coming…

Anyway, it’s early days for Windows 11 – and although there’s plenty of criticism from Insiders on recommendations that were not taken up, I expect we’ll see the continual improvement and evolution of the platform; mostly for the better ( News and Interests is one of the reasons I say ‘mostly’ ).

Microsoft Edge has an Identity Problem

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Right now, it appears that Microsoft Edge is trying to be everything to everyone – which sounds good, until you look at what it could turn into. For enterprise and business, it’s a constantly updated browser that receives frequent Security Baseline recommendations to keep the browser’s settings in line with Microsoft deem as best practise – just like Windows 10/11 and Office apps.

There’s even a ‘Super Duper Secure Mode‘ (which I’m surprised the Microsoft Marketing team approved the name of) which promotes using the browser in the most secure way possible.

Microsoft also provide a fairly open roadmap of upcoming features, and looking for feedback on new items. Check out this list of feedback provided to Microsoft, how long it’s been on their list for, and the status.

The browser itself supports profiles that sign into Azure AD accounts (amongst others) and sync profile data securely to the tenant that account lives in – which can include browser history, favorites, and cached passwords. I’m highlighting here how much trust is put into what Microsoft holds on their business users.

This is the Microsoft I’m a fan of. It’s also why we have openly found out about a new feature currently in canary and dev builds called ‘Buy now, pay later‘. And, it’s also why I’m so disappointed to see this feature, as it flies in the face of what it seems Microsoft is trying to achieve with this trusted, natively embedded in the OS, browser. You can see the angry comments on the TechCommunity post above.

I’d already tweeted my disappointment:

Which lead to a journalist asking for my views for this article:

https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/microsoft-pushes-ahead-with-controversial-buy-now-pay-later-feature-for-edge-browser

I’ll try not to repeat what I wrote there, but it sets a precedent of a slippery slope on where the browser ends and third party features start. Microsoft who have become one of the more ‘woke‘ (which I use as a compliment, not an insult) IT companies, should they really be encouraging ‘buy now, pay later‘ to encourage people borrowing money to buy things online?

What I’m really hoping to see is the retraction of this feature, and it’s why I say Microsoft Edge has an identity problem. It can’t be both a consumer and a business/enterprise solution at the same time, if this is the path Microsoft is taking aspects of the browser down. Do we need to have a consumer SKU and an enterprise SKU of the browser? Different installers?

For the particular feature in question, there doesn’t appear to be a way to turn it off specifically. You CAN turn off ‘Save and fill payment info’ which I expect would disable the Zip pay option, but that’s a handy feature you’re removing from users.

Having Candy Crush baked into Windows 10 Home is questionable, but in Windows 10 Enterprise it’s ridiculous (which thankfully it isn’t). However, it’s in Windows 10 Pro…

Am I being too harsh? So many online stores have the Zip pay option on their own store, along with Paypal payment plan options, so does it matter if Edge does it natively too? In my personal opinion it still does matter, because it’s a line that shouldn’t be crossed at all; advertising and the promotion of third party services for profit, native to the trusted browser. If the desktop wallpaper in Windows 10 was changing to promote anything outside of Microsoft services, people would be outraged.

I also expect Microsoft has a reasonable agreement lined up with Zip, which would make reversing this decision harder (or costlier), which will mean they won’t give it up quickly. Historically we have seen Microsoft change direction based on waves of negative feedback – which is awesome – but I’m really unsure if that will be enough this time.

Microsoft needs to decide what Microsoft Edge is. Is it a trusted platform, or is it a vehicle to increase revenue directly through partnerships, making money off the user? If it’s both, then it needs to have a high level switch to allow users and companies to turn off the money making side – especially when we’re already paying for the OS, and the browser is bundled with that.

Edit: I believe this feature will only turn up if you’re signed into the browser’s profile with a Microsoft account – so less of an impact on business users, but the general points still stand. I’ve seen this profile detection behaviour recently, where advertising fo the Microsoft Start app only popped up when I was logged in with a consumer profile, potentially triggered by one of Microsoft’s home pages – having the same home page in an AAD account profile didn’t show:

Visio for the web is out!

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Microsoft Mechanics (YouTube) has made me aware that Visio for the web was now available. Check out the above video for a great overview on what this is, but I’ll break down my findings so far:

Visio for the web is ‘free’ as long as you have a business license of any sort. The full version of Visio is still available, and there’s a list of feature comparisons between the two here. As the name suggests, Visio for the web is purely a web based version of Visio, but isn’t just a viewer – it allows creating and editing of Visio files. You can download the results as an actual Visio file, or PDF/Image file.

Opening Visio up to to all users in an environment is a big change. Historically, it was limited to an expensive license, so staff who had basic occasional needs would often miss out on using Visio – either by trying to do diagrams in Microsoft Word (which is a horrible experience!), finding a 3rd party solution, or just not doing it.

Although Visio for the web has hit ‘General availability’, as per the advisory below, it is currently rolling out to tenants and is planned to be completed by January 2022:

How do you know if it’s in your tenant? Either see if you have the Visio app in your list of apps:

No Visio
Yes Visio

Or, just try and go to Visio for the web on the URL https://www.office.com/launch/visio?auth=2 and see if you can create a ‘New blank drawing’

My experience was that although the Visio for the web page loaded, I couldn’t create a New blank drawing in a tenant that didn’t have Visio for the web enabled yet:

No license for Visio for the web

Adding a Visio Tab into Microsoft Teams: The app will probably be allowed by default in the Microsoft Teams admin center, you check check directly on this link https://admin.teams.microsoft.com/policies/manage-apps/com.microsoft.teamspace.tab.file.staticviewer.visio/

However, the client side experience was a bit more confusing. On the tenant that didn’t have Visio for the web option available yet, I could add a tab for Visio and pick a file (not that I had any). However, on the tenant that had Visio for the web had the option on the web based version of Microsoft Teams, but not the Teams client. This was on preview version 1.4.00.29480 (64-bit) (and I checked for updates), but a ‘standard’ version of Teams in the same tenant, different user, had the Visio option. Your results may vary!

In the Microsoft Mechanics video, they pointed out that using Visio as a pseudo whiteboard due to it’s sharing capabilities was a really good point. It adds to some of the solutions the product can solve – a virtual whiteboard that may be much easier to use, rather than trying to draw squares, circles and lines with a mouse.

There is a ‘Beginner tutorial for Visio’ content that covers “Visio on the web” is not actually “Visio for the web” as far as I can tell after going through some of the instructions that don’t work. There’s also other references to ‘Visio for the web’ such as this one https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/visio-blog/we-heard-you-diagramming-is-even-easier-in-visio-for-the-web/ba-p/1670427 , so hopefully some of the naming gets cleared up.

There doesn’t really seem to be any content that I could find, to share with end users on Visio for the web basics. If you find something, please share!

Upgrading a drive in a Synology NAS

Posted on by Adam Fowler

I’m running out of space. My Synology DiskStation DS1621xs+ (originally provided by Synology, thank you!) is at 89% full. Rather than waiting until it actually runs out, I decided it was time to upgrade one of the drives.

Because I’m running SHR RAID, I can have different sized disks. All my disks in the unit are shucked from Western Digital (WD) or Seagate external enclosures – because it’s cheaper to do that than buy disks outright. This time I’ve bought an 18TB WD drive, which takes about two minutes to remove from it’s case. (Note that before removing, I always test the drive to make sure it’s not DOA. WD and Seagate should still honour the warranty anyway if a drive fails later, and I’ve done this on a shucked WD drive before successfully).

Synology have an article on what to do to replace a disk with a larger one, which is worth reading for other considerations around the process: https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/help/DSM/StorageManager/storage_pool_expand_replace_disk?version=6

This NAS supports hot swapping the disks, so I don’t need to do any prep or power it down – just make sure you have a backup in case it all goes wrong (which you should have anyway if you care about the data).

Here’s a quick video of the drive swapover:

On the Synology itself – Before the upgrade:

10TB drive has been taken out, Synology starts beeping in a concerning way due to being in a degraded state:

New drive inserted:

Using the Action > Repair option to start the rebuild

Then comes the waiting game for the repair, which took about two days to complete:

Note that adding a single 18TB disk is wasting some of the space. If you look at their RAID calculator (which right now goes up to 16TB only but will still show the problem) before taking out the 10TB in bay 6:

Swapping the 10TB to a 16TB only gives 2TB more available space, and 4TB unused, because it hasn’t got available capacity anywhere to mirror all the space the 18TB disk had:

However, if we drop out another 10TB for another 16TB, we see the available space jump up to 60TB and no unsued space. This will be my plan, order another 18TB drive to shuck which should take me all the way up to 62TB available space.

For home use, I really like the Synology Hybrid Raid (SHR) because it provides actual redundancy, as well as easy expansion. I don’t have to commit to buying a bunch of drives at once of all the exact same size, and can gradually increase if and when I need more space. The process of upgrading a disk is so easy too that it’s not an inconvenience when upgrade time comes around.