If you know about Synology, chances are you know about its network attaches storage (NAS) hardware. Over the course of the last few years, the company made a name for itself as one of the premiere NAS providers for consumers and small businesses who want to make local backups of their data or make it easy for users in an office to share local drive space. Now, the company is making a major move into the cloud with the worldwide launch of its C2 Backup service for its NAS systems, which was previously only available in Europe.
To be clear, C2 Backup is all about backing up your Synology NAS system in the cloud. It’s not a competitor to online backup services like iDrive, Carbonite or Backblaze.
If you are a Synology NAS user, though, this service gives you yet another degree of security. Backing up your data locally is a good first step, after all, but if a disaster strikes your office, your backups are gone, too. Synology has long offered the ability to store backups in the cloud (on Amazon’s S3 service, for example), but it clearly wants a piece of this business, too.
“The flexibility of cloud backup in terms of low barrier to entry and strong future scalability plays a key role in the rapid growth of this market. With the demand for offsite data protection on the rise, we have received numerous requests from regions outside EMEA to expand our C2 Backup coverage,” said Jia-Yu Liu, Director of the Application Group at Synology. “We are happy to announce that all users around the world can now enjoy the same seamless backup experience designed specifically for Synology NAS.”
Pricing for the service seems pretty fair, with plans that start at €9.99/year for 100 GB of backed up data. Prices go up to €59.99/year for a terabyte. Under these plans, you can store 11 backup versions which remain in the system for 30 days. What’s nice here is that only the size of the source data counts against your storage usage, not the individual backups.
For users who need more flexibility, the company also offers a €69.99/TB/year plan with flexible backup schedules and customizable retention policies. The company is also offering a 30-day free trial.
A subscription business is obviously a smart move for Synology. The company mostly relied on its hardware sales for its business so far, but with the C2 Backup and the existing C2 Disaster Recovery services, it now offers two subscription services with recurring revenue.