Syncing with NAS (Synology)

[planck]

Greetings,

So far we have been using a dedicated Windows VM as a file server but we removed that and recently moved to a Synology NAS for our files.

We are syncing files for http nodes. We're using the same profiles that were working before (with the Windows fileserver) with Syncover, using SMB shares.

However, it doesnt seem to corretly. We noticed a delay on changes (sometimes many minutes) whilte we are using real-time sync, and sometimes changes are missed all together.

Is network shares the best way to do this with a Synology server?
Does Synology support "OS signals" to make real-time sync possible?

Thanks
Alex

[superflexible]

File system events are sent via the SMB protocol. I can imagine that they are less reliable from a Synology NAS than from a Windows server. There isn't much you can do. If you want perfect real-time operation in Syncovery, you need Windows storage.

You can add a regular schedule every X minutes to your job so that a full sync will take place. Maybe you even need to turn off real-time completely and sync every minute or so. To speed up building the file list, you can increase the number of folder scanning threads on the Performance tab sheet of the Program Settings dialog.

Finally you can try running Syncovery directly on the NAS. You will find Synology packages on our Linux download page. The Linux version does not include any real-time functionality, but scheduling a regular sync every minute or even every 10 seconds might be faster on the NAS than scanning the folders via SMB.

If you need to mount an SMB share for the destination, you can do that in the Synology web interface and find the mount point relatively easily with the Browse button in Syncovery.

[planck]

Hello,

Thanks for the prompt reply.

Unfortunately running Syncovery on Synology is not a good option for us, primarely because that would mean that we have to make shares to all of our web nodes, and things get a bit weird there with permissions. But there are other reasons too.

Btw, I noticed that Synology has tons of options for SMB. Maybe some of them could help the situation ?

Regards,
Alex

[superflexible]

I don't know. None of these refer to file system events specifically. Maybe limiting the version to SMB2 might make a difference. But you definitely need regular full syncs in addition to real-time.

[superflexible]

One thing I recommend is using Syncovery's real-time mode "Process Complete Folders". Do you have that?

You can also look into the log files. The incoming file system events are listed there. Then you can determine if the events are incomplete.

[planck]

Hello,

No, we were using SMB V2 before, we switched to V3 just to test if there would be any difference, but there's no difference at all.

We noticed that, when we create a file on a http node, the change is made instantly on the Synology server. The problem is that, it takes alot of time to spread to other http nodes FROM the Synology server to the other windows server (which also run Syncovery).

We have sent our a support request to Synology, and we have also included this form thread so they could read.

Btw, when using real-time sync, Syncovery does not allow us to make scheduled syncs more frequently than 5 mins. Is there any way to bypass that limit ?

Thanks
Alex

[superflexible]

Hello,
no you can't bypass that limit.

You should take a look at the log files to see if ANY real-time events come in at all, or if it runs only the regular 5-minute syncs.

You can also enable highly detailed real-time event logging on the Logs tab sheet of the Program Settings dialog. This can be used to prove that the real-time events are not coming in.

If real-time is important to you, you will have to re-think about your hardware choices.

[planck]

Hello,

I have some updates on this from Synology:

1. Is SMB implementation complete on DSM?

No, we do not support all of the functions of SMB. Basically, our SMB service is modified from open source samba, and there are still many SMB functions which are still under developing or not be developed by samba yet.



2. Are file system events sent out normally as they would from a Windows server SMB share?

We do not actually sure which function of SMB does that software use, but we guess it uses the "notify" function of SMB to detect the modification of the files.

If so, there a part of this function we do not support - the notify of the subfolder. That is, if you set up a folder and would like to detect the file events of the files under this folder. But we only support the events under this folder directly and we do not support the flag of the subfolder.

Due to the original samba cannot support this function and the limitation of the linux inotify structure, it may be not able to achieve this function at this moment.

But if you will only modify the files via SMB file transfer protocol, you may consider adding the content "kernel change notify=no" to the smb.conf to change to use the mechanism of samba itself instead of inotify. But it may affect the performance since samba will need to handle more events.

Does this help in anyway to config syncovery to work with synology for real-time events? maybe if I do NOT use the Process Complete Folders feature?

Thanks
A.

[superflexible]

I don't know. I think you have to do regular full syncs. If building the file list for full syncs takes too long, I can offer to implement the Synvovery Remote Service for Synology ASAP, which will generate the listing extremely fast.