When trying to backup a Synology NAS, one has a few options. Synology’s Hyper Backup is great if you have relatively small shares or want to keep your NAS’ configuration safe. However, with larger volume or share sizes Hyper Backup becomes pretty unwieldy because it needs to finish a backup in one go, with no option to resume (i.e. after a power outage). This is bad because all of a sudden Hyper Backup not only has to roll back its already backed-up data, it starts from the very beginning again.
rsync has the ability to resume file transfers, however it is single threaded and relatively slow with an approximate 30-35 MB/s. This sort of transfer speed does not work for larger volumes or shares.
The solution I ultimately landed on was a two-step approach:
- Mount your large share(s) via NFS on the destination NAS.
- Install Rclone from the SynoCommunity community packages.
- Do a normal local folder-to-folder sync.
rclone sync nfs_source_folder local_destination_folder --metadata --transfers 4 --checkers 16 --progress
With rclone, I get a nice and constant 98 MB/s with the ability to cancel and resume at any time.
You might be tempted to use SFTP instead, however this approach did not give me performance numbers even close to NFS.
Hyper Backups deduplication is nice, however I prefer having my backups finish within this decade over saving a few gigabyte.
