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Dropbox is not a backup. The portable hard drive is not spare. True backup, experienced people told me, starts with the 3-2-1 rule: three copies, two types of storage (or drives), and one copy is remote.

And yet my data backup system remains insecure. I’ve tried many schemes, ranging from “pay for Google Drive space and just dump everything there” to “a cross-platform rsync/crontab-based headless system I’m trying to build using StackExchange.” I try not to be the person in infomercial insisting there must be a better way, but when it comes to backing up music, photos, email and cloud-based files, settings and more, I really am that guy. There there is be a better way and it can’t just be the drudgery of setting up a Synology NAS, right?

Well, what if Synology itself knows that not everyone is ready to become a self-employed junior sysadmin with a single client? Here’s how I feel about the BeeStation ($220 at the time of writing). That’s enough backup to be much better than what most people consider a backup (praying a giant corporation never loses or closes their account), but it’s still just one device. It can also make for a pretty smooth climb to a full NAS if that little taste of self-directed storage spurs your ambitions.

Synology’s main idea is that you can use BeeStation in “Your Personal Cloud Journey” with machine learning and face-recognition object sorting for photos and synced versioned files for work. At this level, I’m not that impressed, although 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 more out of your backups.

BeeStation’s best feature is how it makes good backup habits automatic. Within a few weeks of setup, I had both mine and my husband’s Drive and Dropbox accounts synced and regularly backed up; my older music, movies and miscellaneous files hidden; and our photos are regularly backed up from our phones. All of this is then backed up weekly to Synology’s cloud servers (for an additional cost) and is all accessible remotely and on the local network.

Hardware

If you’ve ever owned a hard drive that rests in a powered external enclosure, you’ve had something like the BeeStation. It’s a black plastic box, it has one or two cables plugged into it, and it just sits there and occasionally makes some noises when rotated or accessed.

Not much fuss, though, unless you’re doing a big backup or using it as an ersatz Dropbox to work with files all day. The BeeStation’s internals are packed with heatsinks, passive cooling systems and vibration dampeners, and that design work has paid off. Compared to a (non-Synology) dual HDD bay NAS system that my BeeStation runs, the BeeStation was relatively tame and quiet.

Not having owned the device for the full three-year warranty period, I can only speak to how little I’ve noticed this item in a few months in my office. Synology’s bee-themed branding is subtle, with only a quarter-sized logo imprint on each dimension. There’s a power indicator on the front to tell you it’s working, and the plugs 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 flash drive or cable head for each, you may need to invest in adapters or short connecting cables.

As far as performance goes, that’s not what this device is all about. The Realtek chip inside won’t work with Plex, a torrent downloader, or anything like that (nor does the OS support that). When I gave it my full 140GB (compressed) Google Photos export to import into BeePhotos, it took the system a whole weekend to decompress, analyze and put them in place. Transferring files from a USB4 stick was as fast as I could have imagined; although I’m sure 1GB of memory is a tight spot, I only do this a few times a year. As with any backup plan, you should only need to sync new and changed files once the volume is in place.