Okay, so I’ve been messing around with Hyper Backup on my Synology NAS for a while now, and I wanted to share some stuff I noticed about encryption and how it affects backup speeds. It’s not rocket science, but it might save you some headache.
First off, I started by setting up a simple backup job without any encryption. Just a straight shot from my NAS to an external USB drive. Everything went pretty smoothly, the speed was decent, nothing to complain about.
Then, I thought, “Hey, I should probably encrypt this stuff,” you know, just in case. So, I went back into the settings and turned on client-side encryption. Boom, instantly my backup speed took a nosedive. It was crawling!
I started digging around to figure out what was going on. I mean I have decent CPU on this NAS.
My initial setup looks like this:
- Source: My Synology NAS (obviously)
- Destination: External USB drive (USB 3.0)
- Backup Task: Hyper Backup, single-version
I tried a few different things:
- Checked the resource monitor on my NAS: CPU usage was definitely higher with encryption on, but it wasn’t maxed out. The ram usage is kind of high also, it around 80% when start backuping.
- Switched to a different USB port: Just in case, but it didn’t make a difference.
- Looked at the transfer speeds: Noticeably slower with encryption.
So, what did I learn? Well, encryption adds overhead, plain and simple. Your NAS has to work harder to encrypt the data before sending it off, and that slows things down. The faster CPU your NAS has, the less of a hit you’ll take, but there’s always going to be some impact.
In the end, I decided that the security of encryption was worth the slower backup speed. I just adjusted my backup schedule to run overnight when I’m not using the NAS, so it doesn’t bother me.