After abandoning an overly complicated LXD-based file transfer setup, I walk through using command-line rsync to sync files directly between two Synology NASes, including over Tailscale. I cover setting up passwordless SSH without ssh-copy-id, working around DSM 7’s restriction on Tailscale outbound connections and its lack of Magic DNS, enabling rsync in the Synology interface, excluding metadata and recycle bin directories, fixing permissions, throttling bandwidth, deleting remote files in one-way syncs, and running the job in the background with nohup...
My attempt to rsync a NAS movies directory to an NTFS-formatted USB drive fails with “Operation not permitted” errors on setting times and creating temporary files, even though a manual cp by the same user succeeds. Running rsync with sudo makes the copies work, though owner and permission attributes still get rewritten on every run, possibly because of the NTFS format. I consider the sudo workaround unsatisfactory given my plans to eventually automate the backup...
Setting up a backup strategy on a Synology NAS, I SSH in to locate volume and share mount points and do a dry-run rsync of a movies directory from the NAS to a USB drive. The first run surfaces thousands of @eaDir entries, which turn out to be Synology metadata files likely produced by the indexing service, and I end the post by excluding them via the –exclude option...
I describe setting up a 3-2-1 backup strategy with a local RAID6 NAS, an off-site NAS, and an offline USB drive, and moving away from manually syncing files between them. The post walks through using rsync to sync directories, covering how it copies only changed files, propagates deletions with the –del flag, and works across remote hosts over SSH, with a brief mention of Beyond Compare for manual comparisons...
