Synology BeeDrive Gets Deep Search and Acronis Online Backup

If you have one of those BeeDrives and BeeStations as your simple backup solution, here’s some good news: It’s going to get a bit more sophisticated.

Indeed, Synology today announced two additional features, including improved AI-powered Deep Search and online backup. Let’s find out more.

Synology BeeDrive: Now with Deep Search

Deep Search definitely seems exciting. It’s an AI-powered file discovery engine, per Synology, “designed to solve one of data’s most common frustrations,” which is finding what you need when you need it.

The way it works is that Deep Search analyzes documents and images to deliver fast, relevant results. It supposedly works with both photos and text and intelligently keeps track of information.

Specifically, for photos, users can simply describe what they are looking for, and the result will appear instantly:

• By text: Locate screenshots, receipts, business cards, or even memes based on the words inside them.
• By description: Search with natural language, like “kids playing in the snow” or “sunset at the beach.”
• By time or location: Including cues such as “Yosemite” or “Christmas” enables the system to filter photos based on when and where they were taken.

For documents, Deep Search helps surface contextually relevant results based on the meaning of a query rather than matching text. As a result, users can quickly perform:

• Full-text and embedded image search: Search across both the written content and visuals inside documents, including screenshots, charts, and scanned pages.
• Semantic understanding: Use natural phrases like “profit contribution from subscription services” to pull up the relevant tables across your documents.
• Instant preview: Jump straight to the matching slide, paragraph, or section, instead of scrolling through the entire document to find what you searched for.

Most importantly, Synology says that Deep Search runs locally on the user’s computer and does not upload file content to Synology or the cloud. It does have optional features, including photo location search and cross-language search, that may use external databases or macOS translation services. Hover these features can be turned off.

Still, there’s a catch: Deep Search has rather stiff hardware requirements.

Specifically, it needs macOS 15 or later with Apple Silicon (M1 or later) and at least 16 GB of RAM. On a Windows computer, it needs an Intel Core i5 or AMD Ryzen 5 processor, an NVIDIA GPU with 6GB of VRAM (RTX 2060 or newer), and at least 16 GB of RAM.

Synology BeeDrive and BeeStation: Three years of Acronis True Image Essentials now included

The second feature is a three-year license for Acronis True Image Essentials, added to all existing BeeDrive, BeeStation, and BeeStation Plus. This license can be used for one computer.

While three years is not as good as permanency, you might want to get a new BeeDrive or BeeStation after that long and extend the license for another three years. Or by then, you will have already found a new online backup option. Speaking of which, having a Synology NAS server at a remote location and using Synology Drive for backup is something I’d recommend.

Availability

Synology says that Deep Search is now available as a free software update for BeeDrive users on macOS and Windows, and will be coming soon to Copilot+ PCs. The three-year Acronis True Image Essentials license is available with all BeeStation and BeeDrive models in select regions.