A friend called me last spring in a mild panic because his Synology had eaten a folder of wedding photos, and his backup tool had faithfully copied the deletion to his USB drive. That is the moment most people learn the difference between a sync and a real backup. Copying files somewhere else is not the same as being able to reach back in time.
So the question is not just which tool moves your data, but which one lets you recover it when something goes sideways.
I have run all five of these on home hardware, most of them for years. Here is how they actually stack up when you care about restores, encryption, and not wanting a second job.
What matters in NAS backup software
Three things separate a backup tool you can trust from one that just makes you feel safe. The first is versioning, meaning it keeps old copies so a deletion or a ransomware hit does not wipe your history in one pass.
The second is encryption, so a stolen offsite drive or a compromised cloud bucket does not hand over your files. The third is honestly just how likely you are to keep using it.
A backup that runs for three weeks and then silently fails because you never set up alerts is worse than useless, because you think you are covered.
The five contenders at a glance
Two of these ship with your NAS, and three are free tools you add yourself. That split matters, because the built-in ones are easier but lock you into one brand, while the independent tools work anywhere.
| Tool | Best for | Encryption | Versioning | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hyper Backup | Synology owners | AES-256, client-side | Yes, with rotation | Easy |
| QNAP HBS 3 | QNAP owners | AES-256 | Yes | Easy |
| Duplicati | Cloud backups on a budget | AES-256 | Yes, incremental | Moderate |
| restic | Command-line users | AES-256, always on | Yes, snapshots | Harder |
| rsync | Local mirrors | Via SSH only | Only with hard links | Moderate |
Hyper Backup: the Synology default
If you own a Synology box, this is the one you already have. Hyper Backup lives in Package Center, and it handles the whole job through a wizard: pick a destination, pick folders, set a schedule, choose how many versions to keep.
The destinations are the strong part. It backs up to another Synology, a USB drive, or straight to Backblaze B2, Amazon S3, and a handful of other cloud targets.
Versioning uses what Synology calls Smart Recycle, which thins old versions down to hourly, then daily, then weekly as they age. That keeps the archive from ballooning.
The one thing that trips people up is that a Hyper Backup archive is a proprietary blob. You restore it with Hyper Backup or the standalone Explorer app, not by browsing files directly. For most home users that is fine, but it is worth knowing. The Synology Hyper Backup documentation walks through the destination options clearly.
QNAP HBS 3: the QNAP answer
HBS 3, short for Hybrid Backup Sync, is QNAP's equivalent and covers roughly the same ground. It merges backup, restore, and sync into one app, and it speaks to local drives, remote QNAP units, and the major cloud providers.
Its trick is a deduplication engine called QuDedup, which strips duplicate blocks before they leave your NAS. On a folder full of similar documents or photo edits, that can shave real money off cloud storage bills.
Setup feels a touch busier than Hyper Backup, with more toggles on the first screen. But the versioning controls are flexible, and client-side encryption is a checkbox away.
Duplicati: cross-platform and free
Duplicati is where things get interesting for people who do not want to marry one hardware brand. It runs in a web browser, installs on almost anything including inside a Docker container on your NAS, and targets dozens of cloud backends.
It does block-based incremental backups with strong AES-256 encryption, so after the first big upload, later runs only send what changed. My first full backup of about 400GB to Backblaze took the better part of two days on a home connection, then nightly runs finished in minutes.
The catch is stability. Duplicati has historically been beta software, and I have watched a backup job get into a state where the database needed a repair before it would run again.
It is genuinely good and genuinely free, but I would not make it my only backup. Pair it with something else.
restic: the tool I trust most
restic is a command-line program, which scares people off, and that is a shame. It is the tool I reach for when the data actually matters.
Every restic backup is encrypted, always, with no way to accidentally turn it off. It stores snapshots, so each run is a full point-in-time view even though only changed blocks get written. Deduplication is built in and works across snapshots, so keeping months of history costs surprisingly little space.
Restores are fast and precise. You can mount a snapshot as a folder and copy out one file, or restore the whole thing. It backs up to Backblaze B2, S3, SFTP, and local disks, and you can read about the storage options on the official restic documentation.
The price of all this is that you drive it from a terminal or a cron job. If a command line does not frighten you, restic is the most bulletproof option here.
rsync: the classic mirror
rsync has been around since the nineties and it does one thing beautifully: it makes an exact copy of a folder somewhere else, transferring only the changed pieces. Nearly every NAS has it built in, and it runs over SSH so the transfer itself is encrypted.
Here is the trap, and it is the one that ate my friend's photos. A plain rsync mirror has no history. If you delete a file and the job runs, the copy is gone too.
You can fix this with hard-link snapshots (the classic script here is rsync's snapshot approach), which give you dated folders that share unchanged files. It works, but you are assembling a backup system by hand.
So which one should you pick
Pick by who you are, not by which tool has the longest feature list. On a Synology, start with Hyper Backup to Backblaze B2 and you are done in twenty minutes with encryption and versioning handled.
On a QNAP, HBS 3 does the same job. If you want a tool that outlives your current hardware and you can tolerate a terminal, restic is the one I would bet real data on, ideally alongside a cheap local rsync mirror for instant recovery.
Whatever you choose, the rule that has never let me down is three copies, two kinds of media, one offsite. Set that up once, test a restore, and then go back to living your life.
Frequently asked questions
Is Hyper Backup the same as Synology Drive or Cloud Sync?
No, and mixing them up is a common mistake. Cloud Sync and Drive keep folders in sync, meaning a deletion propagates everywhere. Hyper Backup keeps versioned archives you can roll back, which is what you want for actual disaster recovery.
Can I use restic or Duplicati directly on a Synology or QNAP NAS?
Yes. The cleanest route is to run them inside a Docker (Container Manager) instance on the NAS, which both brands support. You can also install restic as a static binary and drive it from a scheduled task in the DSM or QTS task scheduler.
Which of these is cheapest to run to the cloud?
The software itself is free except for the built-in tools you already paid for with the NAS. Your real cost is storage. Backblaze B2 is popular for home use at roughly six dollars per terabyte per month, and deduplicating tools like restic and HBS 3 reduce how much you actually store.
Do I still need offsite backup if I already back up to a second local drive?
Yes. A local mirror protects you from a dead drive, but not from theft, fire, flood, or ransomware that reaches both copies. Keep at least one encrypted copy offsite, whether that is a cloud target or a drive at a relative's house.
What is the safest option against ransomware?
A tool with immutable or append-only snapshots that ransomware cannot rewrite. restic supports append-only repository setups, and cloud targets like Backblaze B2 offer object lock. Versioning alone helps, but immutability is what stops encrypted files from overwriting your good history.
