A 2012 Synology NAS in 2026: what you can (and can't) do with DSM 6.2

At home I have a Synology DS1512+, a five-bay NAS from 2012 with an Atom CPU and 1 GB of RAM. Today it’s a museum piece, but it’s still where all the household backups end up.

It has one big limitation: it can’t upgrade to DSM 7, Synology’s current system. It stays on DSM 6.2. Here’s what I’ve learned to get the most out of it anyway.

What changes on DSM 6.2

Half the tutorials you’ll find today are about DSM 7, and on an old NAS they don’t apply:

If the tutorial says…	On DSM 6.2 you use…
Synology Photos	Moments (phone photos) or Photo Station
Synology Drive (new version)	Synology Drive Server, the DSM 6 version
Active Backup for everything	Active Backup for Business, with fewer features

Moments works well with its phone app for automatic photo uploads. Once it gave me a “backup failed” error and it wasn’t the network or permissions: it was an unsupported file format. If it happens to you, check formats before tearing your hair out over the connection.

How it’s organised

• Volume 1 (RAID 1, two disks): PC backups with Active Backup.
• Volume 2 (RAID 1, two more disks): user folders, photos and the Raspberry Pi backups.
• Fifth disk: a hot spare. If a RAID disk fails, it steps in automatically.

RAID is not a backup

I’ll repeat it because it’s the most common mistake. RAID 1 protects you from a disk dying. It doesn’t protect you from:

• Deleting a file by accident (it’s deleted on both disks at once).
• Ransomware encrypting your files (it encrypts them on both).
• The NAS itself breaking.

That’s why the Pi’s backups to the NAS keep a 30-day history: if something gets deleted or corrupted, I can go back to yesterday’s version.

How I protect it

A 2012 NAS doesn’t get the security updates a modern one does. So I handle it with care:

• Only SMB and the admin web UI are enabled, and only inside the home network. SSH, rsync and NFS are off.
• Nothing exposed to the Internet. To get in from outside, I use the router’s VPN.
• One user per purpose. The Raspberry Pi has its own user, which can only write to the backup folder. If someone broke into the Pi, they wouldn’t reach the rest of the NAS.

The changing IP problem

The NAS gets its IP from the router via DHCP, and one day it changed. The Pi’s backups were looking for it at the old IP and failed three nights in a row. Now the Pi finds it by name (nas-casa.local), which resolves on the local network even if the IP changes. And fixing its IP on the router is on my to-do list.

What I still need to fix

I have something noted that’s a little embarrassing: the PC backup with Active Backup only ran once, because the task was scheduled as “once”. A backup that doesn’t repeat isn’t a backup. It’s on my to-do list, in red.

When to retire it?

For what I use it for (a backup store inside my home, not exposed), it holds up. I’ll replace it when one of these happens:

• The disks start failing and replacing them isn’t worth it.
• I need something that only exists in DSM 7.
• I want to reach it from outside without a VPN, which I’d never do with an unpatched system.

Meanwhile, a well-locked-down old NAS is still far better than having nowhere to keep your backups.