Hacker News Reader

Synology has always had better software. But they have been more expensive and they have been threatening to lock out some features unless you use their drives.

There is no real competitor on the market right now except QNAP. And who wants to deal with FreeNAS, I have better and more important things to do with my time at work.

View on HN

How is Synology software better?

I've had the pleasure of setting up rsync between Synology and QNAP and I would say the Synology software appears to be better but actually isn't as good.

Synology appears to use older versions of a lot of tools like rsync. Although it doesn't say so, it doesn't rsync the data files, it rsync's the files that make up the backing of the software-raid. It's like rsync of the blocks of a sparse disk image instead of the files within the disk image. This makes it impossible to resume or adopt a previous backup. If any of the configuration for the rsync-send changes, it appears to download the entire remote so that it can compare the contents of the files to the local instead of hashing remotely, which nearly completely defeats the point of using rsync. It took my backup task WEEKS to adopt an existing backup that had very few changes.

I guess within the features I use its been a better experience. i use it as a NAS and DVR. The snapshotting and change reversion features have saved me a few times where engineering employees have messed up their files.

Thanks for the point about NFS though.

FWIW: QNAP has those features too

Reply on news.ycombinator.com