Jumping ship from Synology

artstar

Dabbler
Joined
Jan 10, 2022
Messages
36
Hi all,

I have been a Synology user for the last eleven years. While they have served me well in that time, my recent experience with a secondary BTRFS volume being lost to read-only status after a kernel panic (caused by the Synology Drive indexer working on the other volume, which remained intact) has left me thinking that ZFS is going to be more resilient than that. The BTRFS error was that upon the fourth corrupt leaf, it turned the volume into read-only. I have backups, so it isn't catastrophic but it is cumbersome to have to remove and recreate the volume, then restore the data, as well as re-establish the NFS permissions, etc.

Hopefully I'm not being naive in understanding that ZFS would have a better chance at recovering from such a situation rather than forever banish the volume to read-only until it is destroyed.

In any case, I'm continuing to do my homework with TrueNAS SCALE, with the hope that it will basically satisfy three application requirements beyond file sharing:
1) HyperBackup equivalent (seems to tick that box)
2) Active Backup for Business for backing up live VMware ESXi Hypervisor (i.e. freebie) VMs (I'm hoping the Nakivo application will satisfy that)
3) Calendar (as a central repo for my phone to sync/backup its calendar to)
4) Log Center (seems to tick the syslog server box)

As the Synology units are RS820+ and RS815+ (RAID6), I'm sticking to the 1RU form factor with Supermicro hardware and aiming for RAIDZ2. I'm guessing I should be installing the OS on the RAIDZ2 drives rather than a non-redundant boot SSD but I guess further research will reveal the better way to go there.

Hopefully with all that sorted out, I'll build my two systems to replace both Synology units but one step at a time, of course. :)

Time to work on my Google (well, DuckDuckGo)-fu and see if I'm headed in the right direction!! Looking forward to learning a thing or two from you lot!
 

artstar

Dabbler
Joined
Jan 10, 2022
Messages
36
Oh, and a Synology Drive equivalent too, given I'll need a Window client of some description to afford the same functionality. Probably just rsync for Windows, I'm guessing.
 

Arwen

MVP
Joined
May 17, 2014
Messages
3,600
I can't answer most of your questions, but the TrueNAS OS is always separate from the data disks. You can Mirror the TrueNAS installation, but RAID-Z2 is not really an option. Just make sure you backup your configuration, and you should be good on loss of the OS media. I have a cronjob that backs up my configuration to the data pool. And periodically I backup my configuration off device to my desktop.

Just note that TrueNAS SCALE is in Release Candidate state at present. And even after "official" release will likely be under heavy development, (meaning things that should work, don't and will need a new release after bug fixing).



On BTRFS, regardless of what people want, their are known error conditions that were part of the design. For example, a rename that is interrupted can be half implemented, causing loss of data. That can't happen with ZFS. Either the rename is not done, or is fully complete.

As much as I wanted BTRFS to work well, (it has some nice features that ZFS does not have, like re-balance), it's just not getting the developer's attention that OpenZFS gets. The implementation of RAID-5/6 is not really reliable.

BTRFS also suffers from being tied to Linux kernel development. This is actually a bad thing about Linux. And one reason why RedHat dropped support for BTRFS. RedHat had to keep back porting BTRFS fixes to the RHEL 7 kernels.

OpenZFS has the advantage of working with many Linux kernels, (and other OSes like FreeBSD).
 

c77dk

Patron
Joined
Nov 27, 2019
Messages
467
Welcome to the forums - and on the journey away from Synology (been on it myself)

Since you want to use 1U servers, you might consider installing a couple of sataDOMs for system drives (to save those precious 2.5"/3.5" bays for data), as @Arwen points out system and data are separated. TrueNAS can make a mirror of the boot drives, so no need for hw raid.
 

dak180

Patron
Joined
Nov 22, 2017
Messages
308
Some recommended reading: Introduction to ZFS, Terminology and Abbreviations Primer; with that out of the way I would the recommend the following references when choosing your hardware: FreeNAS® Quick Hardware Guide (and for more detail: Hardware Recommendations Guide) and for specific hardware: Proper Power Supply Sizing Guidance and importantly how the disks are connected: Multiply your problems with SATA Port Multipliers and cheap SATA controllers, Don't be afraid to be SAS-sy ... a primer on basic SAS and SATA and What's all the noise about HBAs, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

Once you have the hardware together you will want to test things: Building, Burn-In, and Testing your FreeNAS system and I have some scripts to help with that. I would also recommend checking out Uncle Fester's FreeNAS Beginner's Guide even though it is geared towards CORE rather than SCALE.
 

artstar

Dabbler
Joined
Jan 10, 2022
Messages
36
Welcome to the forums - and on the journey away from Synology (been on it myself)

Since you want to use 1U servers, you might consider installing a couple of sataDOMs for system drives (to save those precious 2.5"/3.5" bays for data), as @Arwen points out system and data are separated. TrueNAS can make a mirror of the boot drives, so no need for hw raid.
Thanks for the suggestions!

Unfortunately, my board of choice (Supermicro Intel Atom) only seems to support one DOM. In which case, I might just stick to the original plan of using a single Samsung 970 Evo M.2 SSD instead.
 

kiriak

Contributor
Joined
Mar 2, 2020
Messages
122
I recently left Synology and went to TrueNAS Core.

I'm a home user and my background is not on IT, I'm just a hobbyist.
I am happy and very satisfied with by changing to TrueNAS, but transition was not plug and play for me.
I used and old PC in my spare time for some weekends to learn new tricks.

Thers are no Hyperbackup or Calendar like utilities built in the TrueNAS.
For Backup you can use the build in snapshot replication or rsync
and for Calendar you should use something like Nextcloud plugin or install it your own in a container or VM.

If you are going to do all these by yourself,
I would highly recommend to try these (both Core and Scale) in any old PC before putting your data on it.
 

artstar

Dabbler
Joined
Jan 10, 2022
Messages
36
I recently left Synology and went to TrueNAS Core.

Thers are no Hyperbackup or Calendar like utilities built in the TrueNAS.
For Backup you can use the build in snapshot replication or rsync
and for Calendar you should use something like Nextcloud plugin or install it your own in a container or VM.

If you are going to do all these by yourself,
I would highly recommend to try these (both Core and Scale) in any old PC before putting your data on it.
I'd expect some pain along the way. No transition ever goes absolutely smooth, so definitely baby steps. The Calendar thing would be the icing on the cake but it's not critical to my needs. Nextcloud seems to be an equivalent to Synology Drive, more or less, so I'll be doing some homework with that, as it is of particular importance for an automated process I have with another device (the NUC I built into my car).

Backup is a bit of a worry though, as I am a fan of versioning, which is the strongsuit of Hyperbackup. Hopefully there may be something that comes along in the future to address that but I make no expectations of it. I prefer to keep my expectations low so that I may be pleasantly surprised later. :)
 

kiriak

Contributor
Joined
Mar 2, 2020
Messages
122
Synology apps are just plug and play. The same is their maintenance.
You should do a little reading to use and mostly keep updating Nextcloud.

Where do you do the Hyperbackups? (ext HDD? another Synology? ).
I did them to 2 rotating HDDs.
Now I replaced it with snapshot replication to an ext HDD and I also do another backup with a windows client (just in case the backups will be needed to be used by my children that know nothing about ZFS and TrueNAS ans also as redundancy in case I do the replication wrongly).
 

artstar

Dabbler
Joined
Jan 10, 2022
Messages
36
Synology apps are just plug and play. The same is their maintenance. You should do a little reading to use and mostly keep updating Nextcloud. Where do you do the Hyperbackups? (ext HDD? another Synology? ).

Second Synology. Whenever I upgraded, I would keep the former unit as a slave NAS and rotate out the oldest one on eBay or Gumtree. :)
 

artstar

Dabbler
Joined
Jan 10, 2022
Messages
36
As an update for anyone else who might be reading for ideas, I have the following components meeting my requirements:

  1. Synology Drive = Syncthing (from TrueCharts)
    1. This seems to be the simplest solution and works reasonably well with the exception of resolving minor sync issues (as in to clear/ignore). Nevertheless, with a bit of poking and prodding, it seems to be serving its purpose of synchronising files between TrueNAS and the NUC on the local network (WAN access not required for this use case).
  2. Hyperbackup = nothing yet. I'm currently rsync'ing from TrueNAS to my Synology RS820+ slave NAS. It keeps reporting permissions errors about setting atime. No time at this point to examine what's going on but it's not the end of the world since the files are still getting synchronised anyway.
  3. Syslog = syslog-ng? (from TrueCharts)
    1. This one seems to be exceptionally tricky to set up and I'm nowhere near the finish line yet. I have the UDP log streams making their way into the application but I'm trying to figure out the storage for the logs as well as allowing access to it by some kind of web UI for navigating around the logs. I have tried asking the TrueCharts Discord but it seems after a couple of rookie mistakes in opening a ticket (admittedly due to me being selective with what I deemed relevant screenshots of the container set up after being told twice to provide the entire lot) and getting timed out, I'm not inclined to seek help from what seems to be some overzealous Discord mods on power trips.
 

danb35

Hall of Famer
Joined
Aug 16, 2011
Messages
15,464
Syslog = syslog-ng? (from TrueCharts)
I'd probably be looking at Graylog, though part of that is my ignorance of alternatives. I know it's available as a plugin for CORE; I'm not familiar with the state of things on SCALE.
 

NugentS

MVP
Joined
Apr 16, 2020
Messages
2,945
I'd expect some pain along the way. No transition ever goes absolutely smooth, so definitely baby steps. The Calendar thing would be the icing on the cake but it's not critical to my needs. Nextcloud seems to be an equivalent to Synology Drive, more or less, so I'll be doing some homework with that, as it is of particular importance for an automated process I have with another device (the NUC I built into my car).

Backup is a bit of a worry though, as I am a fan of versioning, which is the strongsuit of Hyperbackup. Hopefully there may be something that comes along in the future to address that but I make no expectations of it. I prefer to keep my expectations low so that I may be pleasantly surprised later. :)
You could use your old synology to do file based backups to. I have 3 NAS's. 2 TrueNAS and 1 Synology. I snapshot from TN1 to TN2 AND use active backup to do a SMB backup (and VM Backup) pulling backups fom TN1 to the Synology. You need a reasonably modern Synology (for Active Backup for Business) but it works, and works well
 

danb35

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15,464
Somewhat surprisingly (at least to me), this doesn't appear to be available on SCALE, either through TrueCharts or through the "official" apps. I'd expect one of those would add it if requested, but I don't see it there now.
 

artstar

Dabbler
Joined
Jan 10, 2022
Messages
36
You could use your old synology to do file based backups to. I have 3 NAS's. 2 TrueNAS and 1 Synology. I snapshot from TN1 to TN2 AND use active backup to do a SMB backup (and VM Backup) pulling backups fom TN1 to the Synology. You need a reasonably modern Synology (for Active Backup for Business) but it works, and works well
I like your thinking. I'll do that instead of the push rsync'ing. Thanks for the suggestion!

Somewhat surprisingly (at least to me), this doesn't appear to be available on SCALE, either through TrueCharts or through the "official" apps. I'd expect one of those would add it if requested, but I don't see it there now.
Thanks for looking into it. I only checked this message after I did some searching as well. :) Oh well, it's not the end of the world. I'll happily work with the devices in question individually until the ultimate solution comes along.
 

quantum8

Cadet
Joined
Jun 8, 2022
Messages
4
Joining in on this journey! I only have basic requirements but this seems like a much more resilient solution for me coming from a 2 disk setup as I've finally realised mirroring just isn't safe enough of a solution for my data.
 
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