NAS upgrade question

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professorhat said:
bigboss said:
Your suggestion is good though. I can backup my PC onto NAS drive & use Synology just as a media drive + Time Machine backup. Where should I back up my Synology NAS to then? :?

Probably easiest and cheapest would be a 2 TB USB drive which you can just plug in every now and then direct to the Synology and kick off a backup.

Hmmm.....now that my backup is sorted with WD, this seems to be the best option to backup media from my Synology. Where are those eBay deals I always seem to find when I don't need them? :type:
 
Took about 10 hours for Synology to finally be ready. Also updated to DSM 4 software. Meanwhile, Time Machine backup to my WD NAS is also complete.

I'll use my 500GB external hard drive to backup media from the Synology (should be plenty for now).

I'm working today, so back to Synology on Saturday.

I want to transfer all music. & videos to Synology from Windows 7 as well as MacBook. Few questions:

1) There will be a lot of duplicates as music is coming from 2 laptops. Any way of getting rid of the duplicates?

2) How do I wirelessly transfer music from the MacBook? Synology software is installed in Windows 7 laptop.

3) Will digital copies of movies (redeemed on iTunes) play if I transfer them onto the Synology?
 

Xanderzdad

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bigboss said:
1) There will be a lot of duplicates as music is coming from 2 laptops. Any way of getting rid of the duplicates?

If they are exact duplicates then copy them all into one folder and any copies will overwrite each other. Then for a final check create a new iTunes library and import all the songs from the new combined folder and then ask Itunes to show just the duplicates.
 

AnotherJoe

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Backing up an entire NAS is generally a non-starter. There is too much data and it will take too long.

Yet raid only protects against disc failures - not the entire NAS failing.

A solution is to have 2 identical NAS.

Then if one NAS completely fails you can take the discs out of the broken NAS and put them in the other NAS, allowing you to retrieve your data.
 
AnotherJoe said:
Backing up an entire NAS is generally a non-starter. There is too much data and it will take too long.

Yet raid only protects against disc failures - not the entire NAS failing.

A solution is to have 2 identical NAS.

Then if one NAS completely fails you can take the discs out of the broken NAS and put them in the other NAS, allowing you to retrieve your data.

Well, the entire Synology NAS will only have about 200GB data to begin with. So backing up to an external hard drive shouldn't be a problem. It doesn't affect me how much ever time it takes. Of course, RAID doesn't protect from entire NAS failing, hence the idea to back up to an external hard drive.
 
Xanderzdad said:
bigboss said:
1) There will be a lot of duplicates as music is coming from 2 laptops. Any way of getting rid of the duplicates?

If they are exact duplicates then copy them all into one folder and any copies will overwrite each other. Then for a final check create a new iTunes library and import all the songs from the new combined folder and then ask Itunes to show just the duplicates.

Thanks! I'll give it a go. :cheers:
 

professorhat

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AnotherJoe said:
Backing up an entire NAS is generally a non-starter. There is too much data and it will take too long.

This is a mad statement. How long is too long?! Anything and everything can (and should) be backed up. You might have to find the right solution to do it, but it's always possible. Certainly a 2 TB NAS isn't going to present too much of an issue.

AnotherJoe said:
A solution is to have 2 identical NAS.Then if one NAS completely fails you can take the discs out of the broken NAS and put them in the other NAS, allowing you to retrieve your data.

AnotherJoe said:
A solution is to have 2 identical NAS.

Then if one NAS completely fails you can take the discs out of the broken NAS and put them in the other NAS, allowing you to retrieve your data.

It's a solution, but an expensive solution. For most home setups, one or two USB disks will do the job for a significantly lower cost. Unless you had to have your data back up and running quickly (i.e. a few minutes instead of a few hours), but very few home users are that reliant on their music collection.
 

Andrew Everard

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Well, QNAP TS-412 with four 3TB WD Reds took about two hours to initialise and set up in RAID 6. Now just a matter of copying some 2TB of music content over – current estimat from MuCommander is 25 days
smiley-surprised.gif
 

professorhat

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Andrew Everard said:
Well, QNAP TS-412 with four 3TB WD Reds took about two hours to initialise and set up in RAID 6. Now just a matter of copying some 2TB of music content over – current estimat from MuCommander is 25 days
smiley-surprised.gif

Eek - something wrong there! Even at 100 Mbps, 2 TB should take about 2 days. Move up to Gigabit and it goes down to about 5 hours...
 

professorhat

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bigboss said:
I want to transfer all music. & videos to Synology from Windows 7 as well as MacBook. Few questions:

1) There will be a lot of duplicates as music is coming from 2 laptops. Any way of getting rid of the duplicates?

2) How do I wirelessly transfer music from the MacBook? Synology software is installed in Windows 7 laptop.

3) Will digital copies of movies (redeemed on iTunes) play if I transfer them onto the Synology?

How are they all stored? If all in iTunes, I'd say best would be to merge them into one iTunes Library stored on the NAS. Probably easiest way would be just to copy one of the iTunes libraries to the NAS, then merge the other into this (see the WHF video on getting iTunes to a NAS).

Once you've done this, any movies included in iTunes should work just as they did when they were stored locally.
 

Andrew Everard

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professorhat said:
Eek - something wrong there! Even at 100 Mbps, 2 TB should take about 2 days. Move up to Gigabit and it goes down to about 5 hours...

Not concerned - it'll just chug and the time will reduce. Direct connection via the same gigabit switch - should be fine...
 
professorhat said:
bigboss said:
I want to transfer all music. & videos to Synology from Windows 7 as well as MacBook. Few questions:

1) There will be a lot of duplicates as music is coming from 2 laptops. Any way of getting rid of the duplicates?

2) How do I wirelessly transfer music from the MacBook? Synology software is installed in Windows 7 laptop.

3) Will digital copies of movies (redeemed on iTunes) play if I transfer them onto the Synology?

How are they all stored? If all in iTunes, I'd say best would be to merge them into one iTunes Library stored on the NAS. Probably easiest way would be just to copy one of the iTunes libraries to the NAS, then merge the other into this (see the WHF video on getting iTunes to a NAS).

Once you've done this, any movies included in iTunes should work just as they did when they were stored locally.

Thanks! In the process of copying my iTunes library onto NAS now. Once done, will then copy iTunes from MacBook in the morning & merge into this.

I was hoping to have movies in a separate shared folder. Anyway, will see once copying is done.
 
Andrew Everard said:
Well, QNAP TS-412 with four 3TB WD Reds took about two hours to initialise and set up in RAID 6. Now just a matter of copying some 2TB of music content over – current estimat from MuCommander is 25 days
smiley-surprised.gif

:O

I wonder why mine with just 2 X 2TB drives took 10 hours, is it because I chose Synology Hybrid RAID :?
 
:dance:

Finished transferring music, videos & pictures from my Vaio. Taking a break before I repeat the marathon on MacBook.

I then jail broke my Apple TV2 using Firecore (as my PS3 wouldn't recognise .avi files).

I can now watch movies stored on my Synology through my Apple TV! It even automatically downloads metadata for each film, resulting in beautiful artwork & explanation of the films! :cheer:

Thanks Paul Hobbs, for the tip regarding Firecore!
 

whoam1

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Andrew Everard said:
Well, QNAP TS-412 with four 3TB WD Reds took about two hours to initialise and set up in RAID 6. Now just a matter of copying some 2TB of music content over – current estimat from MuCommander is 25 days
smiley-surprised.gif

Curious as to why you've decided on RAID 6?
 
I managed to get some movies play on PS3, but not all. The Apple TV is connected to my bedroom TV. This brings me to another dilemma. How do I get all the videos play on my Kuro in the lounge? My AV receiver has only 4 HDMI inputs, & I have no intentions to add an HDMI splitter. I already have PS3, Sky HD, blu ray player & .......ooh, looks like I may have an empty HDMI slot! Let me check... :clap:
 

Chisy1

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bigboss said:
I managed to get some movies play on PS3, but not all. The Apple TV is connected to my bedroom TV. This brings me to another dilemma. How do I get all the videos play on my Kuro in the lounge? My AV receiver has only 4 HDMI inputs, & I have no intentions to add an HDMI splitter. I already have PS3, Sky HD, blu ray player & .......ooh, looks like I may have an empty HDMI slot! Let me check... :clap:

Another jail broken ATV2, although not easy to come by except on eBay for ££££.

You could pick upan ATV3 but you would then need iTunes running to stream to it. Where do you watch most TV/films, if on Kuro move the ATV2 to that and connect ATV3 to bedroom? ATV3 around £85 on Amazon.
 

Andrew Everard

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whoam1 said:
Curious as to why you've decided on RAID 6?

Safer in that even if two drives fail it's still recoverable, and with four 3TB drives in use, I'm not exactly going to run short of space any time soon. 6TB should be more than enough for a while.
 

AnotherJoe

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Raid6 uses an extra parity stripe so will use about 40% of available space for backup, as opposed to 20% of raid 5, ans also requires more computing power.

Using raid6 on the ARM processor in a TS412 is going to give slow transfer speeds, as the processor isnt really up to the task. Raid6 is better suited to the higher end models.
 

Andrew Everard

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AnotherJoe said:
Raid6 uses an extra parity stripe so will use about 40% of available space for backup, as opposed to 20% of raid 5, ans also requires more computing power.

Using raid6 on the ARM processor in a TS412 is going to give slow transfer speeds, as the processor isnt really up to the task. Raid6 is better suited to the higher end models

Yes, aware of both of those points, but once the NAS is loaded am not going to be shunting vast amounts of data about - it's only going to be used to stream music, which will hardly put that much strain on it.
 

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