I am a recent owner of a Synology NAS. I have just installed the HA integration and I like all the statistics it is collecting.
I am a user of Synology Hyper Backup with a local hard drive as the backup destination. My issue is that I want to create an air gap after the backup is completed so that an unauthorized user/virus/worm can’t destroy my backup. When the backup job is to run, I wish to power on the hard drive, and when it completes, I wish to power it off. This is a green issue as well.
Synology Hyper Backup supports an option to automatically dismount the local backup drive after the backup job completes.
The problem is that after it is dismounted, it needs to be manually removed and reinserted.
A solution that I envision uses a new HA sensor to detect that the drive has been dismounted to automatically power down the external hard drive via a smart plug. I would then use a time based automation to power it up before the Synology backup job is to run again. This would allow for automated local USB hard drive backups, yet keep the local USB hard drive safe from rogue user/virus/worm activity when not in use during a backup.
I am using the Synology DS224+ which has two USB ports, one in front and one in back. For my devices, the front port shows as /dev/usb1p1 and is mounted as /volumeUSB1/usbshare at the OS device and filesystem level. I assume there is a different device name for the other ports and attachments.
Without this feature, I would need to have both the automatic power-off and power-on actions be time based in HA. The problem is that the power-off automation has a possibility of powering off the external hard drive while it is mounted and possibly while it is in use in a long backup job. Caution would dictate keeping it powered on much longer than necessary to accommodate occasional long backups.
