Drive BeeStation next to a laptop and smartphone on a desk, with a notebook and pen in the foreground, the laptop screen displaying photos from BeeStation in a grid.
Enlarge / In this image distributed by Synology, a thoughtful worker uses BeeFiles on his MacBook and BeePhotos on his iPhone, always keeping his BeeStation at hand. He may have important thoughts about which books “Island” or “DECO” to keep in private, redundant storage, forever.
Synology
Dropbox is not a backup solution. A portable hard drive is not a backup solution. Experienced people have told me that a real backup starts with the 3-2-1 rule: three copies, two types of storage (or devices), and a remote copy.
And yet, my data backup system remains shaky. I’ve tried many plans, from “pay for Google Drive space and dump everything there” to “a cross-platform headless system based on rsync/crontab that I’m trying to build with help from StackExchange.” I try not to be the person who, in an infomercial, insists that there must be a better way, but when it comes to backing up music, photos, emails, and cloud-based files, settings, etc., I am indeed that person. has to be a better way to do it, and it can’t just be about setting up a Synology NAS, right?
What if Synology knew that not everyone is ready to become an independent, single-client junior sysadmin? That’s how I see the BeeStation ($220 at the time of this writing). It offers just enough backup to be way better than what most people consider backup (praying a giant corporation never loses or shuts down its account), but it’s still just a single device. It can also create a fairly smooth climb to a full-fledged NAS if that little taste of self-managed storage ignites your ambitions.
Synology’s main pitch is that you can use BeeStation as part of “your personal cloud journey,” with machine-learning facial recognition and object sorting for photos and files synced and versioned for work. On that level, I’m not as impressed, though some people will probably appreciate these self-hosted alternatives to Drive, Dropbox, Google Photos, and iCloud more than I do. And they’re certainly a good way to get the most out of your backups.
BeeStation’s best feature is how it automates good backup habits. Within a few weeks of setting it up, my and my partner’s Drive and Dropbox accounts were synced and backed up regularly; my music, movies, and older miscellaneous files were organized; and our photos were regularly backed up from our phones. All of this was then backed up to Synology’s cloud servers every week (for an additional fee), and everything was accessible remotely and on the local network.
Front view of the BeeStation; Mario Kart figure for scale. There is no way to turn this front light off, although it does not flash when accessing.
Kevin Purdy
Back of the BeeStation. The proper ports are there for the job, maybe just a little too close together.
Kevin Purdy
Side image of the BeeStation. The branding is nice, rather discreet.
Kevin Purdy
Material
If you’ve ever owned a hard drive that sits in a powered external enclosure, you’ve had something similar to the BeeStation. It’s a black plastic enclosure, there’s a cable or two plugged into it, it sits there and sometimes makes spinning or accessing noises.
Not much noise, though, unless you’re doing a big backup or using it as a Dropbox ersatz to work on files throughout the day. The BeeStation’s innards are full of heat sinks, passive cooling systems, and vibration dampers, and that design work paid off. Compared to a two-bay (non-Synology) NAS system that my BeeStation was running next to, the BeeStation was relatively smooth and serene.
Without having owned the device for a full three-year warranty period, I can only say how little I noticed this thing for a few months in my office. The bee-themed Synology logo is subtle, with only a quarter-sized logo imprint on each size. There’s a power LED on the front to let you know it’s working, and the jacks are on the back. The USB-A and USB-C ports are right next to each other, so if you’re using a particularly bulky USB stick or cable head for either, you may need to invest in adapters or short connecting cables.
As for performance, that’s not what this device is about. The Realtek chip inside won’t run Plex, a torrent downloader, or anything like that (and the OS doesn’t support it). When I handed it my full 140GB (compressed) Google Photos export to import into BeePhotos, it took the system an entire weekend to unzip, parse, and set it up. Transferring files from a USB4 drive was as fast as I could imagine; while I’m sure the 1GB of memory is a bottleneck, I only do it a few times a year. As with any other backup plan, you should only need to sync new and changed files once the bulk is in place.
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