Synology 2 bay NAS DiskStation DS220j (Diskless)

UPDATE: I began to experience the following problem. There were times that I would notice a lot of disk activity, even though there was nothing going on on the network. After continuing for a while, the device became unresponsive, both to software commands, and even to not shutting down, using the power button procedure, which then required cutting off its power (not recommended). I did some research and discovered a history of people reporting this very problem about a number of Synology NAS devices, some going back six years. Since I did not want to get involved with Synology support, I decided to see if I could determine the cause of the problem. Since it appeared that the longer the unit was in use, the greater the chance of the problem occurring. I scheduled a periodic stopping of its various services and starting them 10 minutes later. For almost two months, this prevented any further occurrence of the problem. That changed two days ago when the problem appeared two days in a row. I'll adjust the period between service restarts, but If that fails, I find a suitable replacement, which will not be Synology. I cannot recommend this product. I needed a reasonably priced means to backup the devices on our network that didn't require me paying an online backup service for the rest of my life. When I saw it on Prime Day, I took advantage of the deal. If you are looking for information on how it does as a media server or related things, you won't find much of interest in this review. I'm only using it to back up files on all our devices. So here goes. THE GOOD: The unit is well designed physically, so adding the drives and buttoning up the case is easy. I'm old fashioned, so I would have preferred a unified program to enable and configure things, but I guess when they wanted the hardware to work on Windows, Linux and the MAC, using the server/client approach in conjunction with your web browser was the simplest way to go. While using multiple apps is a bit less convenient, the is a help app that leads you through setting the essentials up with little problem. Within a couple of days, I had all the files I required backed up to the RAID volume, as well as a secondary backup to one of the two 2-bay SATA to USB stations that I connected to the DS220j. On top of that, it allowed me to encrypt files and send them to MS OneDrive or Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. So I had a pretty robust backup system. THE BAD: Because of its one size fits all approach, it can take a while to remember which of the included apps is used for specific purposes. Give yourself some time to get used to things. My advice is to add shortcuts for the apps you need on the page, and forget the main menu. It saves time in the end. THE UGLY: There are a plethora of apps included that have nothing to do with file backups, or even media servers, photo sharing and the like. There are apps that permit you to run a web server, or even a mail server. These are fairly rudimentary, but the problem is that they all allow access from the internet, and while there is a firewall app, it too is rudimentary. It does give you the ability to block IP addresses, even whole countries, but it has no access to online IP/domain/network reputation services which can alert you to potential threats. If you don't have a network firewall that does provide such features, it seems a bit risk. I gave it 4 stars, because while I worry about security issues, you can protect your network from them with the appropriate measure...and it is, after all, very good at backing things up.