Speaker 1: There are only two kinds of people. Those that have lost data and those that will. And unfortunately, the only time we give a second thought to backup is when it's too late. And I get it. Backup isn't the sexiest bit of tech in the world. But if you get a virus right now and lose your family photos, baby's first step or your wedding video, you're going to be heartbroken. Not to mention the impact that it will have on your work, school and college life. Of course, we have external hard drives and those are superb, but they are what we call a single point of failure. If the external drive fails or gets lost or stolen, you instantly lose everything. Not to mention that if you didn't encrypt your drive, anyone who finds it has instant access to all your confidential stuff. And yes, we have cloud storage, which we love. But what we don't love is that we are trusting our personal information to somebody else's hard drive, and we have no real control over that. We certainly don't love that we cannot backup absolutely everything from every single device, as the amount of data that we would need to pay for all that extra cloud storage would be ridiculous. Ever try telling your teenager that she doesn't need to keep every meme photos and videos since the beginning of time? Good luck with that. So the solution is to create our own cloud storage that automatically backs up all our data and we can access it from anywhere in the world and we can give access to files and folders. Essentially, we could have an entire Google Drive, iCloud, OneDrive equivalent system that we're in charge of. If you're super geeky and have the technical skills, yes, you can spin up Linux or some type of system and be responsible for managing that and most importantly securing that. But if you just want a plug and play system that does absolutely everything within minutes, let me show you the DiskStation DS923 Plus from Synology, who are also today's sponsor. You see, six years ago, this actual exact hard drive stopped working and I lost my entire wildlife photography from South Africa. It's all on there. I cannot access to that. On the very same day that it stopped working was the day I installed my first Synology NAS, which is a network attached storage, and I have never looked back since nor have I lost any data since. Everything is automatically backed up from all my family devices straight onto the NAS without us having to do anything. And the best bit is that it's so simple that anyone who can do this in less than 15 minutes, which I think we can all agree is time well spent to never having to worry about your data again. So let me show you what I'm talking about. This is the heart of the operation, the Synology DS923 Plus. Let's take a quick walk around this device. At the bottom, you've got two NVMe slots. Let's flip it to the front. You've got four bays. That's where your hard drives are going to go. You've also got a USB port here and of course the power on button. Right, let's look at the back of the device. Here you've got not one but two Ethernet ports. You've got redundancy, you've got another USB, eSATA port, and of course this is where you plug it in to give this baby some power. Let's flip it back to the right way up and now we're going to pull out one of the trays, one of the bays, that this is where the hard drive is going to sit in it. And without needing any tools, you simply open up the packaging that your hard drive came in and you simply slide it in and lock it in place. A big shout out to Seagate for setting up some of the Ironwolf drives. These drives are optimized for 24 by 7 loads of NAS servers and you can just load them into the bay like this. And then take the second drive, slide it in next to it, and then simply push down to lock it in. And just because it can take four drives doesn't mean you have to fill up all four drives. In this case, I've only got two. The other two bays simply sit there waiting for their turn to be filled at the appropriate time. And that's pretty much it. Let's power it up and plug it into our router. All right, seriously, could that be any easier? Place the drive into the Synology disk station, plug the supplied power and network cable, and switch it on. Congratulations, you have yourself a NAS. That's the hardware part taken care of. Now we have to set up the software and as you can imagine, it's just as simple. So open up your browser, go to find.synology.com and it will find Synology NAS on your network. Next, there'll be a whole bunch of prompts that you just need to follow along and accept the terms, let it set up your hard drive, give the NAS a name and create an administrator username and password and make sure that's nice and secure. Pretty straightforward stuff, but this is the important one, is the Synology account. You can skip over it if you wish, but I wouldn't. Why? Because you're going to get all those values. Secure sign-in service, access your Synology NAS from anywhere, which is exactly what we want. Around-the-clock monitoring and protection, perfect. If for some reason you don't want it, you can obviously skip over this. It's not mandatory. And just like that, we have a quick connect ID, which basically means our system is now accessible with our username and password that we've just created, either from a web browser or from a mobile app and the entire process was seamless. Okay, we're almost done. The important step here is how are we going to use the two hard drives that we've stuck into the Synology disk station? Are we going to do something called a RAID and what type of RAID? And this is where people normally freak out. Now comes the part where you need to make a decision of how much hardware failure protection you would like by selecting the type of RAID. In other words, let's use our external hard drive as an example. It has my data on it. This drive failed. I lost everything. Now, what would have been super smart is to have two of these guys, where I have backup the same information onto one copy over here, one copy onto the second drive. So if this drive failed, like it did, then I wouldn't have lost everything or my photography would have been on my second drive. So same data saved in two different places. That's kind of the high level explanation of what a RAID is and Synology has a deeper explanation, which I will link in the description below. Personally, I like Synology's SHR, which is Synology Hybrid RAID. This is a great option because it allows you to have flexibility. You can add and mix different drive sizes and still get the redundancy in case one of the drives fails. Okay, now the hard drives are ready. The only thing you need to do is follow the wizard to set up two things. The first thing it says that access from anywhere has already been set up. Brilliant. We've done that in the first step. But just like you, we're seriously worried about security. Who can access what? So the next step is going to be, hey, let's enhance your security. We want to enable two-factor authentication. Do you want to enable that? Absolutely. Click on enable now. Now that we're nice and secure, we can of course go and create shared folders. We can manage the file station. We can do a whole bunch of things. But what we're really interested in is the backup data. And this is where you get the package called Synology Drive. It's a server and a desktop client, which basically means that there's a bit of software that runs on your NAS and a bit of software that runs on your phone or on your desktop or on your laptop. And it looks like this. All you're going to do is you're going to install the specific app for your desktop and a specific app for your mobile phone. And here is the beauty of it. From the moment that you set it up, whatever you select that needs to be automatically backed up and synchronized can be done between your device and your brand new NAS Synology DiskStation 923 plus. And it can be accessed from anywhere in the world. And congratulations, you are done. You are now the proud owner of your very own personal cloud storage system. Now, as a family, this is a game changer. Since I control the entire system, I have no problem with storing important documents like wills and health insurance or even have our passports so that if anything happens when we travel, we instantly have access to them. And yes, we have two factor authentication. So we know it's nice and secure. Check out the links in the description where you can get more information. And speaking of storage, check out these five uses for USB flash drive that you probably didn't know about. And this video right over here that YouTube thinks you should watch. Hit the head down here to subscribe. Give the video a thumbs up before you head out. And I'll see you in this video or this video or I'll see you in both. Let's go.