Recovery USB disk is a nightmare

[jea-paul]

My setup: NAS 425+ 18TB HD (3 disks), 1TB SSD. The HD are for backup and the SSD has a portion VM for HomeAssistant and another portion for FastShare.
My computers linked to NAS: ZBook Fury 17G8 (Win 11 pro), HP Elitebook 8770w (Win 10pro) and Lenovo Thinkpad L520 (win 7 pro).

I wanted to create a recovery for all 3 PCs using the Synology ActiveBackupforBusiness SW.
The backup between PCs and NAS with 3 different tasks works flawlessly.
Then I wanted to create AND TEST the recovery function.
It took me 6,5 hours of testing all kinds of SW to get it up and running.
The verdict was:
1) ZBook: works using ventoy + sunology recovery.exe (HirenBoot doesnt work because a) lots of checksum erros and b) the NVIDIA configuration doesnt allow changing the resolution of the screen - remains 4K and I did not want to fiddle around with commands in cmd, to dangerous for me);
2) Elitebook and Lenovo works using older version of Hiren'sBoot (it indicates WIN 11 -strange) + synology recovery.exe. Using Ventoy on both computers displays "TLoading" and nothing anyore - I left it running for 6 min and then stopped - maybe if I would wait for 10 or more minutes it would work, dont know.

It is completely unacceptable that a premium storage company like Synology expects standard Windows users to endure a multi-hour troubleshooting misery—fighting missing Intel drivers, blind trackpads, and QWERTY keyboard resets—just to perform a basic recovery in a moment of distress.

I assume that the Hidden Truth About Synology's Design Choices is that for Linux created their own environment, and that work very, I tried it.
I believe Synolgy cut corners for Windows users:

1. The Linux Team Got It Right: For Linux, Synology built a dedicated, standalone recovery environment. They bundle a fully updated, modern Linux kernel that automatically includes almost every open-source network and hardware driver on Earth. It boots natively, detects your hardware instantly, and works.
2. The Windows Team Took a Shortcut: For Windows, instead of compiling a clean, standalone, independent boot system, Synology simply built a tiny software interface and left the entire heavy lifting of the operating system to Microsoft's generic Windows PE engine. They passed the responsibility of hardware compatibility entirely onto Microsoft. Because of that shortcut, when Microsoft strips out specific enterprise network chips (like your Intel I219-LM) or struggles to scale high-resolution panels like my HP DreamColor 4K, Synology’s recovery framework completely falls apart out of the box. If I hadn't possessed the technical stamina and patience to spend 6.5 hours combining Ventoy, Hiren's, and standalone executables, a standard user would be left entirely stranded with a dead computer and a useless backup vault.

I really hope Synology engineers (or anyone else for that matter) provide feedback to my post because unless I am completely wrong and there is a out-of-the-box solution that I haven't found or there should be a serious introspection by Synology for Windows users (yes, I know, I still use Win7, Win 10 and Win 11 on different PCs).

Cheers, Jean-Paul (Belgium)

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