So i’ve finally got a Synology NAS. Unfortunately my previous NAS only had 2x500GB drives so for now i’m just going to use the Synology for making my media (mostly music) files available for all my devices and my Sonos so I don’t need my Mac on all the time, and eventually i’ll replace the drives with larger capacity ones to carry out more tasks.

The way I think I want to manage this is keep the main files on my macbook and copy them onto the Synology and set it up to synchronise with my macbook, so the Synology mirrors the Mac. I’m not entirely sure how to achieve this looking at the software the NAS uses. There seems to be a number of applications/features that might be able to do this, but i’m not sure which is the best way to do this. Anyone got any hints/tips/instructions?

Thanks

Hmm, I have a Synology and macbook and have never really figured out a means of doing this that I was completely happy with. You may want to take a look at Carbon Copy Cloner. I prefer having the synology shared out with NFS as most apple specific stuff seems to expect AFP for remote shares – I expect I’ll end up using rsync eventually.

OK, thanks. So have you just copied over all your music files to the Music shared folder on the File Station?

There is no way to do that with the files on the NAS drive as it relies on the Mac to push the files to a share on the NAS.

Your best approach might be a backup application that does differential backups between the Macs Music folder and your NAS music share.

Dropbox installations on NAS and macbook. Check the Enable LAN sync so that it doesn’t have to work too hard over the inter web.

OK, thanks. So have you just copied over all your music files to the Music shared folder on the File Station?

Yes, and my iTunes library file, then just point the macbook at that. I rarely use iTunes TBH, my Sonos pulls music from the NAS, I only ever use iTunes to sync my phone.

Synology NAS here. Currently an 1813+ as the main device, but as long as it’s DSM they are all the same.

I have all the shares setup as AFP and SMB shares, I don’t use NFS – just prefer SMB as it works cross platform, although these days I don’t think it makes a bit of difference. AFP I avoid as it was too buggy, and again struggled across platforms.

For mapping of drives, OSX always used to struggle to auto map like windows so you had to mount each time. I wrote scripts for each of the fileshares, each time the mac boots it finds the drives (one Media, one Software, one Backups).

For my Air I don’t keep much on it, but backup important files. iTunes accesses all media from the NAS, and Plex library from the NAS. I use Rsync to backup each time I start up on the local network for all regular documents. It replicates all that is on my Air to a NAS replica.

I follow the same principle for other machines, the Pro has more backed up but it’s just a backup. The Mini is a media machine and is used for BluRay rips, each night it looks for new rips that have appeared, copies to the NAS and deletes of the machine.

The NAS is the main hub, and operates as file shares for all media and files that can be shared, this means I can get to all software and media, with all music appearing to the amps in each room, all TV’s run plex so can stream movies and TV from a single source. Far simpler.

For any files (music, docs, whatever) that you want to replicate a copy to the Mac, just mount the drive and use Rsync. If you don’t like the rsync interface, then search for a tool called BackupList+, it’s an automator for Rsync it works really well.

Once you have everything setup you can add Time Machine to the NAS as it’s useful backup, or if all is synced to the NAS Time Backup is useful for a time machine like backup so you can prevent numpty file deletes. Obviously this is space dependant so bit the bullet and chuck a couple of high capacity drives in there.