I figured it would be very simple to set up a Synology, connect to it online, and automatically it would backup all of my contents. I’m wrong.
Hardware: DS420j, Mac mini 2018 (Sequoia), Thunderbolt drive bay.
Setup: Thunderbolt drive bay connects directly to Mac mini. DS420j is set up at a remote location 40 miles away for redundancy. VPN is not an option due to the owner of the remote location.
Data: my Thunderbolt bay has approximately 8-10million files. They’re usually about 4-500kb each.
So I set up Synology Drive Client on my Mac and chose the Thunderbolt bay to be backed up. The client says “320000 files to process” and I leave it running all day. At the end of the day it is frozen around 302-304 files and simply won’t complete. I stop the backup and start again. Again it goes to “320000 files to process” and stops around the 300 files mark. I’ve repeated this probably six or seven times now and it simply won’t complete.
As well, it doesn’t have access to certain files or folders. I need the ability to backup ALL data regardless of permissions, since there could be a lingering ACL or ownership setting in a sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-subfolder that I don’t want to tamper with yet every time I backup it skips a few folders due to permissions.
Given the extreme nature of this data (in the multi-million file count range) I simply can not run any process to sniff out or automatically set permissions or ownership within the volume, I really need a solution to let Synology Drive just plow through and backup everything at once and automatically thereafter.
I feel lost and almost hopeless that Synology can be a viable solution for my needs which at first seem simple but aren’t, due to the file system used by MacOS which isn’t fully supported on ext. I was told that a “full bare metal restore” can be performed from such a backup but I can’t believe that whenever Synology Drive gives me constant warnings that hidden “.” files and system files can’t be backed up because of permissions issues.