As you might imagine, I have tens of thousands of photos. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if I lost them all; but I do try and make an attempt to keep them safe. My recent photos sit on my computer and are backed up to a separate disk in the same computer. Every few months I move images off my computer and store the photos, along with the rest of my collection, on a network attached drive (NAS). This NAS has only one drive in it, so I then back up the contents of that NAS to another NAS (still with me?).
As you might imagine, this is a long process, with the back up of NAS to NAS taking nearly twenty four hours. The good news is that I haven’t had to do this for nearly two years. The bad news is that this is because my NAS drives will not support more than one terabyte and are full. Which means my computer is filling up with photos as far back as 2012.
Summary: I need a new NAS.
The Son to the rescue (again). In the box containing hair products, there was also a Synology DS215J NAS, just waiting to accept the two 3TB drives sitting in my drawer. Good times.
I originally purchased Synology because they have a reputation for working well with Macs; plus their operating system does many clever things. So it was with some excitement that sat down on Saturday to install my new toy. Two days later the excitement has dimmed somewhat.
On reflection, I should have paid heed to my experiences while attempting to update firmware on my existing Synology some five years ago. It’s worth revisiting this story here; not so much for the post, but for the comments which became somewhat vitriolic thanks to someone called Jacob who took objection to me and life in general.
Anyway, back to the new adventure. The very brief, four page instruction sheet indicated that I should insert my disks in the NAS; so I did. Then it told me I should plug the NAS into my network and turn it on; so I did. Then I should enter http://find.synology.com in my browser and the system would find my NAS and initialise it; so I did and it didn’t find it. So I downloaded the latest Synology Assistant as an alternative and used that to find the NAS. It didn’t. The bastard just sat there blinking, avoiding all attempts at communication.
After an hour or so of aimless fucking around, I booted into Windows where the NAS was immediately discovered and initialised. So much for playing well with a Mac.
Time to download some of the sexy utilities onto the NAS. Whoops, it can’t access the internet. Four hours later, after forays into the dark art of networking, in areas where I am not qualified to operate (i.e. all of them), in both Windows and Mac OS; I gave up on the sexy utility option. Maybe later.
With evening approaching, I decided I should copy all my photos on the old NAS to the new NAS. A simple drag and drop seemed to be all that was required. What I received instead was a drag and hang. Every attempt to copy from one to the other crashed the browser, in both Windows and Mac (I spent much of the day jumping between operating systems in search of a working solution. And when I write “jumping”, I mean painfully slow Windows boots). I will spare you the details, but after night had fallen I gave up and plugged a USB drive into the old NAS and copied some images onto it; then plugged it into the new NAS and copied them across. With nearly 1TB of images and a small USB drive, this is taking some time and is still in progress as I write this. Once that is done I can get rid of the old NAS units and concentrate on moving images from my computer onto the new box.
Which still leaves the issue of internet connectivity. I could take a six month course in networking in an attempt to make it work; but instead I am employing my usual strategy of throwing money at the problem, by buying a new gigabit router that is on the Synology approved list of “routers that our NAS can work with and connect to the internet without a problem. Honestly”.
I remain cautiously pessimistic.
Comments 🔗
2015-01-26| Andrew saysI fear you have painted poor Lloyd with the wrong brush ( he of the busted dribbling mouth )…I believe you meant the fine example ( of what I’m not sure) Jacob ( aka “Spike is an internet d bag who defends tech companies”) - I only read it as it was before my time here - but I’m sure you can blame the mismatch on seepage of Klorane ( which sounds suspiciously like a toilet bowl cleaner ) into the brain….
2015-01-26| Spike saysOops, sorry Lloyd.
2015-01-27| Ray saysI do believe this is where I came in and I still don’t get it!
2015-01-27| Grant saysI know just what you mean. I’d rather be out in the motor house valve-grinding a Hillman Minx…
2015-01-27| Andrew saysexit stage left…and act natural….
2015-01-27| Andrew saysI notice the icon for the Grand Poobah Spike seems to be turning slightly more grey in the beard - it must be working…
2015-01-30| Grant saysDon’t worry, it’s just the headlamp of an on-coming train…