Reading the Adios, Hola! page written by a bunch of security researchers, I'm glad I never did.
In simple terms, using Hola could expose you to serious risk. Hola operates as an "exit node" for traffic, which means someone else's data goes through your computer. That makes it seem as if your connection was being used, which could be for anything, even unsavoury and illegal activities.
You can't control this, nor can you see what your bandwidth (or how much data) is being used for by Hola.
Anyone with a Hola account can go through your computer's connection - and it will look like it was you who generated that traffic.
It gets worse though: through its separate Luminati business Hola sells access to its network of millions of users.
Luminati customers use Hola installations as proxies, as per above, for anything they want, charging up to US$20 per gigabyte. Hola users don't get any of the Luminati charges however to offset the cost of the bandwidth being used.
Some of the things you can do with Luminati include setting up a botnet for a large denial of service attack with Hola users' bandwidth.
Now, there's nothing illegal about Hola per se. You could even argue that it's clever peer to peer technology, and besides, the end-user license describes how Hola works.
How many Hola users read the fine print though?
Unless you're comfortable not having full of control over how your network connection is used, and by whom, remove Hola.
Gear: Synology DS415+
If like me you have an ever-growing amount of business data and personal files to store, you've probably thought about what's the best way to do it. There's the cloud which is superbly convenient and accessible from anywhere as long as you have a fast internet connection with a large data cap. Oh yeah, and cloud storage accounts can be costly with regular subscriptions to pay.
Using both local, fast network accessible storage (NAS) with the cloud is a way to get the best of both worlds. NAS vendor Synology is attempting that scenario with the four-drive DS415+ and has done a good job of it.
The DS415+ comes with a very impressive array of features, available through mostly free downloadable apps. It can be used as a small business server, for development, to run a website, your own private cloud service and to try out things like virtualisation, Docker containers as well as the usual content playback features.
Despite this, the DS415+ is easy to set up and to use, although figuring out at least some IT jargon and terminology is as always helpful before you start.
It's not the cheapest NAS box out there at just under a grand; the total cost of the DS415+ with four Seagate 4 terabyte drives was $2,100, but you get a fair bit for your money including 2GB or RAM, a reasonably powerful quad-core 2.4GHz Intel Atom processor, dual gigabit Ethernet network ports, USB 3.0 and eSATA connectors for external drives.
What's more the DS415+ is unobtrusively designed and very quiet, suitable for home and small office environments.
The four drives were set up with Synology's Hybrid RAID, and with one disk fault tolerance. You can have two disk fault tolerance too, but at the cost of storage space. I ended up with 10.2 terabytes of space out of a possible total of 14.5TB. That's an acceptable trade-off and the fault tolerance works: I pulled out one drive from the running system, which recovered gracefully and without data loss.
Adding the drive back results in the DS415+ rebuilding the disk array, and that took almost a working day.
You can also configure the drives in various way, mirror them, or just use them in one big array for maximum speed and capacity at the expense of safety when something goes wrong.
It's also possible to add solid-state drives (SSDs) to the DS415+. These won't make much difference in performance for large files compared to normal hard drives, and will be more expensive and you'll have less space. If on the other hand you have lots of little files to read and write, the SSDs make a big difference as they're more responsive.
Overall, I was quite happy with the Seagate hard drives, and by combining the two Ethernet ports, hit 150 to 200 megabytes per second transfer speeds. That's not the fastest there is, but pretty good for the class. The DS415+ wouldn't be the best choice for say image and video editing; for that you'd want a NAS box with fast, 20Gbps Thunderbolt connections for instance.
It might seem a bit strange to suggest you need a backup for a NAS, but you should. The DS415+ is not invulnerable, or could get stolen or if misconfigured, hacked.
Also, the Linux-based DiskStation Manager operating system does not yet offer a "bit rot resistant" file system - Synology said it will launch one later this year, using the BTRFS file system that tries to make sure your data remains in correct form and the bits on the disks aren't flipped by cosmic rays or whatever.
Backing up could be to external drives, another NAS box, or a cloud service like Crashplan which I will report back on once it's set up. One piece of advice though: start backing up early on, before the NAS box fills up, so you don't need to start with a huge amount of data to transfer.
The DS415+ is managed through a secure browser-based interface that mimics a computer desktop. Once you figure out where things are, it's not that hard to use, but Synology could do some more fine-tuning here.
Also, the web-based interface is annoyingly single-threaded in parts: updates to apps and the NAS operating system have to be done one by one for instance.
Speaking of updates, lots arrive from Synology to the DS415+ OS and from third party developers of apps on a regular basis, which is good news.
The Synology DS415+ has turned out to be a surprisingly useful little device for business and personal use, allowing me to dump a bunch of gear and run services with storage on the NAS box, and comes recommended.
