How I configured my Synology NAS and Linux to use rsync for backups

I backup an iCloud Photo Library to a Synology using rsync.

Getting to where I am now has been a terrible voyage of discovery. Why is it so hard to get photos out of iCloud? Why are the photos organised like they are in the library bundle?

A bit I love about my script is that it’s worked for about a year now, and that it posts success to a muted Slack channel and failure to one with notifications.

In order to get a local disk large enough for my photo library, a VM mounts a drive over iSCSI that is actually on the Synology, then rsyncs the files to another volume in the same Synology. It’s nasty and probably breaks the macOS TOS but it works.

Rsync is bizarre when copying files to Synology. It'll constantly slow down and speed up all the time, have you ever seen this?