I use Beyond Compare to sync files from my laptop to my NAS which is a QNAP (my laptop is Linux Mint). It is incredibly slow, to the point that it is driving me crazy. Admittedly, I have lots of large files on my laptop that I move around frequently, so that may just be how it is. I do have my laptop setup to sync to my phone with Syncthing, and it seems like my phone is always up-to-date and in sync with my laptop. But of course it is syncing in, I guess, “real time” as opposed to a Beyond Compare backup which does everything only when I tell it to when lots of changes have already been made at the end of the day. Is it possible to install Syncthing on QNAP? Perhaps that would make things a bit faster, although I’ve always had a hell of a time trying to install something that isn’t a proprietary app from their store. Anyway, any suggestions are welcome.

EDIT: Plugging into ethernet instead of syncing over wi-fi helps speed things up a bit, but not as much as I would like.

  • jlow (he/him)@beehaw.org
    10·
    9 months ago

    Be aware that syncing is not a backup (if you have not specifically set up one way sync). If something goes very wrong and you loose or corrupt data on the main machine corrupt files may be synced (or files deleted from the “backup” machine as well).

    • renard_roux@beehaw.org
      3·
      8 months ago

      Just spent 3 hours today with my stepmom trying to tame the “backup” situation on her work computer (a Mac). I’m just going to dump the (somewhat angry) rant I wrote my wife on the way home on the train:

      … and then helping [stepmom] with computer backup for ~3 hours. Made a lot of progress but will need to go back for round 2, need her to get another external drive first.

      Apparently her “IT guy” is some old colleague from previous job. Most braindead setup I’ve ever seen 🤢

      Use Carbon Copy Cloner to “backup” (copy) her Desktop and Documents folder to a local OneDrive folder, hope that gets clouded from there. Last time I was there, OneDrive wasn’t even running, so nothing was happening. Even if it had been, it was set to “leave local files where they are”, so her HDD was almost out of space. This time, it couldn’t even be opened because her OS is too old to run it 🙄

      Another CCC backup set to copy “full computer” to an external drive (to external root folder, relevant later); CCC full backups are 1:1 clones, so can be restored onto new hardware … unless the external drive isn’t formatted with same filesystem as computer. Of course, it wasn’t (FAT32 for a 5TB drive🙄). Oh, and only set to backup on “drive reconnected”, so no backups if she leaves it plugged in. Which of course she did.

      On top of that, her main working folder is, of course, her Downloads, all 400 GB of it (and none of it added to any cloud backup in any way) 🙄 So once in a while she would manually move (not copy) files to both of her external drives, one reliable LaCie Rugged, one sketchy no-name drive, to clear up space. Except that “full system” CCC backup that runs on “reconnect” is pointing at the reliable drive’s ROOT folder, so every time that runs it would delete ALL the files she had manually moved there 🙄

      Luckily she has that secondary (sketchy) external drive; all the files on the rugged one are gone forever.

      Also - OneDrive for “backup” - what would happen if that folder was deleted locally? It’s fucking SYNC! OneDrive would simply remove the files from cloud (if the program had even been (capable of!) running)!

      What an idiot 🙄 Wonder how many other people he’s “helping” 😬 I should just follow in his wake and make a living fixing his stupidity.

      Also on the To-do for next meeting:

      1. set up a password manager, as her current system of manually copying her passwords (all of them the exact same 5-letter word, followed by the exact same 4-digit year, followed by one of 5 symbols, rotated for “security”) from last year’s paper calendar to this year’s paper calendar (with little or no notes about what they’re actually for) is … less than ideal.

      2. install software (Eagle) to manage her ~600 GB collection of work image files, half of which are in folders in her Downloads folder, the other half living dangerously on that sketchy external drive, all of them in semi-randomly named folders with nothing even remotely resembling any sort of system.

      3. copy the files on the current Rugged external drive to the new Rugged external drive so I can format the current one to a FS that can handle TimeMachine.

      4. upgrade her OS so OneDrive can actually run, although I won’t be using it for “backup”, because:

      5. setting up a proper cloud solution (B2) with proper backup software (Arq or Kopia) to make daily cloud backups of the primary external.

      6. setting up her external drives (at that point two Rugged drives) so one does daily backups (CCC + TimeMachine), and the other does a weekly backup of the first one before getting locked in the safe, with primary also hosting all her images.

      Wish me luck 🙄

      • jlow (he/him)@beehaw.org
        3·
        8 months ago

        Oh wow, what a nightmare. So lucky she has you, I’m always a little sad thinking how awful it must (and apparently is) be for people who don’t have resident nerd doing this kind of stuff for them.

        Good luck!

        • renard_roux@beehaw.org
          3·
          8 months ago

          Thank you 😊

          I’m happy to help, and she wrote a very sweet message to say thanks, she was very happy 😁

          And I’ll be very pleased once we get it all sorted. I left her computer copying the files from that sketchy drive to the other one, so at least, until I go back, there should be a bit of redundancy 👌

          • jlow (he/him)@beehaw.org
            2·
            8 months ago

            Oooof, that’s so scary. The problem is obviously that if nothing goes wrong now it’ll confirm his believe that it was no big deal …

            • renard_roux@beehaw.org
              1·
              8 months ago

              Agreed, which is funny because he’s an intelligent guy, and I wouldn’t normally take him for someone who’s fall for this type of confirmation bias, but tech is a blind spot.

              Also, I think he sees me as someone who is overly cautious (for one thing, there are some differences in opinion about how my wife and I raise our kids), which probably means that because the warning about his IT setup is coming from me, it’s already somewhat tainted by that.

              * adult son is over reacting; take with grain of salt; roll eyes *