I recently ran out of cloud space for the backup of my Synology NAS. I have been using their C2 Service for years, but its costs have increased beyond my budget, so I used this opportunity to re-jigger my back up strategy.

Part of this reconfiguration included adding a larger USB drive for local storage. However, I found that adding an additional external drive to the Synology NAS presented a few challenges.

The first of which was that the Synology NAS only has two USB ports, both of which were already in use. To solve this, I added a powered USB Hub.

Solving this problem, however, introduced a new one. Much to my surprise, the Synology OS (DSM, as it’s called) dynamically renumbers the address of USB devices. Connecting my previous drives (which had years-long backups) and the new drive caused each to “move” to new addresses. Which meant that not only did I have to reconfigure all my backup sets, I also had to start all over and wipe out the previous back ups. (This is just one of the many deficiencies of Synology’s Hyper Backup app.)

If there’s a solution, I don’t know what it is. But if you’re planning on adding more USB drives to your Synology NAS, be advised that it’s a major headache. Once you have a drive plugged into a port, don’t you dare touch it, unless you want to all start over.