There are a number of ways to migrate your data, depending on the age of the NAS, OS versions, and filesystems in use. Synology have a guide to help you decide. It’s not the most straightforward to understand though, so the quickest way to get going is to install Migration Assistant on the new/destination NAS and follow the prompts. It will tell you if your setup isn’t compatible.

Hyper Backup might be your best option if one or more of the following are true:

• Migration Assistant isn’t compatible
• want to change filesystems
• you want to use new disks in the destination NAS
• you want to change the file structure
• you want to start fresh with app/OS settings

If you have plenty of space, and there are no Shared Folder name collisions between the source and destination NAS, you can follow the official instructions for migrating using Hyper Backup. However if there are collisions, or you want to modify your folder structure, use the steps below:

Setup and transferring the files

(These steps are identical to the start of the official Hyper Backup migration guide)

• If old and feeble, disable all packages possible on the source NAS to free RAM and CPU time
• Install Hyper Backup
• Open Hyper Backup
• Create a new “Data backup task”
• Select “Remote NAS device” as the destination
• Under “Create a backup task”
  • populate remote NAS credentials
  • select a Shared Folder on the destination NAS
  • enter a Directory name for the files on the destination NAS
• Select data from the source NAS to include
• Do not select any Application configs
• Name the task and select options
  • uncheck compress backup for data that’s not very compressible as it will just slow things down and not save much space
  • disable schedule as we want to run just once
• Don’t enable backup rotation
• Apply
• Backup Now

Unpacking on the destination NAS

This is where we do things differently. I haven’t looked into the details, but I think the .hbk files created by Hyper Backup are a database file of the contents, along with the files themselves (possibly compressed). While Synology encourages you to create a restore task in Hyper Backup, you can also just double click in File Explorer to browse the database and select files/folders to extract. This means we can selectively extract files, as well as extract sub-directories of a Shared Folder into an existing Shared Folder with the same name.

• Open File Explorer and find the destination you set on the source NAS Hyper Backup task
• Double click on the .hbk file
• Select the folder(s) you want and hit Copy To and select the destination – repeat if splitting to multiple destinations
• Close the window and delete the .hbk file when done