Surveillance Station 9.3: What Is New, What Is Gone, and What to Check Before Updating

Surveillance Station 9.3 is a bigger release than the version number suggests. It adds a new Event Center, raises the CMS ceiling to 50,000 cameras and brings natural-language video search to the DVA7400 — but it also removes multicast streaming, retires C2 Backup for Surveillance for new users, and strips Search and Widgets out of the desktop. This guide covers what Surveillance Station 9.3 adds, what it takes away, and what to check before you press update.

SynoPower Club Point: Read the removals before the new features. Synology puts them under “Important Note” at the top of the release note and most people scroll straight past to the shiny list underneath. Two of them — multicast streaming and the recording rotation default — change how an existing system behaves, and neither is something you want to discover from a gap in your footage.

What Surveillance Station 9.3 changes at a glance

Surveillance Station 9.3 shipped as build 9.3.0-12139 on 20 August 2026. It requires DSM 7.0-41890 or later, so most systems can take it, but the changes below are worth reading in order.

• New: Event Center, Surveillance365 cloud backup, DVA Attribute Search, Semantic Video Search on the DVA7400, vacancy detection and Dynamic Privacy Masking on Synology cameras.
• Removed: multicast streaming, the desktop Search and Widget features, and the standalone CMS entry in Application Center.
• Changed: recording rotation is on by default for new installations, and VS360HD and VS960HD are now streaming-only in two applications.
• Retired: C2 Backup for Surveillance is closed to new users, replaced by Surveillance365.

Five things Surveillance Station 9.3 removes or turns on

These are the Surveillance Station 9.3 items that change the behaviour of a system you already run. None of them is reversible by declining a setting after the fact, so read them before updating rather than after.

• Multicast streaming is gone. Cameras that used multicast now stream over unicast instead. On a large deployment that changes your network load profile, and it is the single change most likely to surprise a business installation.
• Recording rotation defaults to on. This applies to new installations, with the threshold expressed as a percentage of total storage and a floor of 10%. It lives under Recording, then Archive Settings, then Recording History.
• The desktop lost Search and Widgets. The desktop has been redesigned and now shows system resource usage in the taskbar instead.
• CMS is built in. It is no longer listed in Application Center because it ships as part of the package.
• VS360HD and VS960HD are limited. From Surveillance Station 9.3 they stream only in Live View and Timeline. Other applications still open but are no longer maintained, which is the polite phrasing for end of life.

If you run any of these, the safe order is to read the note, check your own configuration against it, and only then update. Our Surveillance Station overview covers where each of these settings lives.

Event Center is the biggest structural change

Surveillance Station 9.3 pulls Events, Bookmarks, Live Counting, Counting Reports and License Plate Report downloads out of the Recording application and into a new Event Center. If you have a documented workflow that says “open Recording, then Bookmarks”, that instruction is now wrong.

The practical gain is cross-server search: Event Center handles Synology and third-party events in one interface and can search across up to 100 recording servers. Third-party Advanced Events have also been reorganised into native Surveillance Station events, which means some event names have changed; Synology publishes a mapping table for the old and new names.

Surveillance365 replaces C2 Backup for Surveillance

This is the change with the clearest commercial consequence. Surveillance Station 9.3 adds cloud recording backup through Surveillance365 with end-to-end encryption, and at the same time closes C2 Backup for Surveillance to anyone who does not already subscribe.

• Existing C2 Backup for Surveillance subscribers can keep using the service until their current subscription expires.
• New users, and anyone without an active subscription, can no longer start with C2 Backup for Surveillance at all.
• The replacement is Surveillance365, which is also the service that lets a Synology camera record to its own memory card and be viewed remotely without a NAS.

If cloud backup is part of your retention plan and you were intending to add C2 Backup later, that option has closed. Plan around Surveillance365 instead.

What Surveillance Station 9.3 adds for DVA models

The deep-learning models get the most substantial feature additions in Surveillance Station 9.3.

• Attribute Search identifies upper-body clothing colour, lower-body clothing colour, vehicle colour and vehicle type. This is the difference between “find people between 2pm and 4pm” and “find the person in the red jacket”.
• Semantic Video Search on the DVA7400 lets you search footage with natural language rather than filters.
• UK two-line license plates are now recognised on DVA models and on the BC800Z camera.
• The DVA7400 rackmount deep-learning NVR is supported as of this release.
• Person and vehicle snapshots on DVA models have been improved for quality.

New camera and recording features

Several Surveillance Station 9.3 additions apply to ordinary installations rather than deep-learning hardware.

• Automatic camera discovery on the local network, which shortens the most tedious part of any new install on Surveillance Station 9.3.
• Custom RTSPS and SRTP paths when deploying cameras, useful for models that are not on the certified list. Our guide to Synology camera compatibility covers when you need this.
• White light control through Action Rules on selected models from AMCREST, AXIS, BOSCH, DAHUA, FOSCAM, Reolink and Synology.
• Vacancy detection and Dynamic Privacy Masking on Synology cameras, the latter masking people rather than a fixed region.
• External devices as audio input for cameras, and server name plus client IP as watermark parameters.
• Batch export of camera settings from multiple servers into an editable spreadsheet, or into a configuration file for import.
• Bookmark improvements: spectators can be granted permission to add, edit and delete bookmarks, and bookmarks can be downloaded in batches.

CMS at a new scale

A single HD6500 acting as CMS host can now manage up to 5,000 recording servers and 50,000 cameras. That is a large jump, and it is paired with several CMS reliability fixes: batch updates that could fail, recording servers with two-factor authentication that could not be added, and failover servers rejected despite a compatible Device Pack.

Fixes worth knowing about

The Surveillance Station 9.3 fixed-issues list is long. Three of them matter more than the rest because they affected things people actually reported.

• A license warning that would not clear. Before Surveillance Station 9.3, after updating a recording server, incorrect license counting could leave an “insufficient licenses” warning on screen permanently. If a customer has told you their licenses vanished after an update, this was probably it, and 9.3 fixes it.
• Home Mode geofence drift. The geofence area could shift away from where you drew it because the saved coordinates were not precise enough. If your Home Mode automatic switching has been unreliable, this is a genuine cause rather than a phone problem.
• Cameras stopping recording during Snapshot Replication. Taking a snapshot of the Surveillance Station recording folder could stop cameras recording, which is about as quiet a failure as this software produces.

Also fixed: test emails being flagged as spam, high CPU after deleting bookmarks, archive tasks failing with dual recording enabled, and security vulnerabilities.

How to update to Surveillance Station 9.3 in 4 steps

There is nothing unusual about installing Surveillance Station 9.3 itself. The care goes into the two minutes before it.

Does Surveillance Station 9.3 change anything about licenses?

No. Surveillance Station 9.3 does not change how device licenses work, what they cost or how many your hardware includes. A Synology NAS still includes two, an NVR-series unit four and a Deep Learning NVR eight, licenses are still perpetual, and purchased licenses can still be migrated while the default ones cannot.

The only license-related item in this release is the bug fix described above, where a warning could persist because of incorrect counting. If you need the underlying detail, our guides cover what Surveillance Station includes for free, what extra licenses cost and how to add and activate them.

Frequently asked questions about Surveillance Station 9.3

References and video walkthroughs

• Surveillance Station release notes, the primary source for everything on this page.
• Synology DVA7400, the rackmount deep-learning NVR added in this release.
• Synology HD6500, the model behind the 5,000-server CMS figure.
• Surveillance Station Help: License.
• Surveillance Station product overview.

The walkthroughs below cover earlier versions, so the desktop looks different after the 9.3 redesign, but the concepts and the license flow are unchanged.

Newly installed and wondering what to configure first? Start with motion detection that does not cry wolf, then Home Mode so your phone stops buzzing at you, and read why an official license key matters before buying anywhere cheap.