Hybrid Backup, Snapshot Replication, and Active Backup for Business seem to be a solid set of remote backup options which I couldn’t find simple, non-proprietary alternatives for

I assumed there was some great open source alternatives to any of these. That’s surprising to be honest. And yes Synology is very simple, and this has pros and cons. It doesn’t your shit can’t get rocked. I had some issue with certificates and it took two weeks of downtime to get back up and running.

NUCs provide fairly good value for the machine but ultimately you don’t avoid any of the work adding a synology to the mix. But if it seems like a good value why not pick one up for a rainy day?

I only use SHR-1 which has one parity drive. This is for a 6 bay. It’s just as performant as raid. The benefits are being able to add new drives without wiping all the data first, and being able to have multiple drive sizes. in raid, if you have multiple drive sizes, each drive is cut down to the size of the smallest drive in the array (at least from what I know).