TerraMaster Forum

I've been struggling to get my backup system working well with my F4-425 Plus for about a month.

Originally I was going to simply use the built in TimeMachine functionality so I could back up my Macs as I always do. But the NAS struggles constantly with the writes and TimeMachine fails nearly all the time. I thought I could use TerraSync but didn't like the idea that I could only back up to my Home directory as I'd like to keep my backups on a dedicated Shared Folder (more on that in a moment).

I thought I was onto something with SyncThing. By setting it as Send-only from my Mac and Receive-only on the NAS, I have been slowly but painfully gettin my files copied over. I have staggered versioning enabled on the NAS end to help with versioning. It's been a week of copying, but I'm slowly getting there. Seeing "System is sluggish" messages all the time really hits home how slow a HDD array is.

Today I realized that if I created a Shared Folder and then added it as a "team folder" in TerraSync, the backup feature does see it and can send the files to that location. Cool! But I'm already so far into my SyncThing copying and I can't find any retention settings for TerraSync, which worries me that I'll either run out of space because it'll keep every version of a file or it won't keep enough versions and I'll be SOL when I try to restore a file.

So I'm kinda stuck. I feel like TerraSync may be on par with SyncThing, but I can't find the controls I need in order to know how it handles versioning. In addition, I can't figure out how it stores those versions. Additionally, I'm not sure if it's actually faster than SyncThing. Oh and from some tests I've done, it doesn't look like it keeps the files in any proprietary format, which is nice.

Does anyone have any experience or insight into using one over the other for backups? Thank you!

You can find the version controller at the indicated location in the figure, and when backing up with Terrasync, you can choose to retain multiple versions.

Hi,

I have also been experimenting with backup on an F4-425 for quite some time.
In the end, I came to two conclusions:
- Never use a Seagate Barraccda HDD.
-> Check the pure write speed by manually copying to an SMB share. Around 200MB/s should be possible here. (RAID 1 and 2.5Gbit/s network)
(With Seagate, I “only” achieved 5Mbit/s at supposed full load on the NAS).
- Copy data using (e.g.) FreeFileSync via SFTP.

Yes, this means you don't have versioning.
But the backup is much faster than SyncThing.
I (unfortunately) had to say goodbye to SyncThing because it was extremely slow.
In addition, you save yourself the “open” SMB share.

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