Migrating a Synology NAS to a UniFi UNAS Pro 8 with Robocopy, SMB Multichannel | Hacker News Reader

Migrating a Synology NAS to a UniFi UNAS Pro 8 with Robocopy, SMB Multichannel

hanselman.com

71 pointssoheilpro62 comments

Starting with robocopy is nuts. I'd have started with rsync and just let it run overnight. The peace of mind that it'd do the right thing and not needing to research flags are more than worth any speed tradeoffs.

I recently migrated from a synology to a diy nas, 8to to transfer, did it through rsync, took a few days but it ended up working nice.

What software are you running on your DIY NAS?

TrueNAS, I have really mixed feelings about it. It's ok but the company behinds it start to do not great stuff

I understand where you might be coming from but: robocopy SOURCEPATH DESTPATH /mir /r:1 Is pretty easy to remember.

Given Ubiquiti's history of abandoning entire product lines, I cannot ever imagine trusting a ubiquiti closed-source NAS product with my data. No thank you. Not when TrueNAS exists.

Basing your major infrastructure choices on Ubiquiti feels a kickstarter purchase every time. Huge claims, borderline religious following community, an intentional and almost proud absence of technical support, and a coin toss if the product line will still exist in 24 months.

And when they work as advertised they are fantastic.

Thankfully it's not dissimilar to Synology internally: btrfs+mdadm on the smaller ones, ZFS on the big ones.

Shouldn't be hard to migrate if it got discontinued.

I agree with Scott, no need to use rsync - he should have used rclone instead! It can be easily installed in the package manager, and with 4 threads (or multiples of 4) it fully uses/saturates the 4 1GbE links.

Also a hint for anyone planning something similar: if you use Synologys SHR format (based on mdraid+btrfs) and your new destination supports or uses BTRFS too, you can just btrfs send your whole pool to the new NAS!

(Since its a single process it wont saturate any LAG though)

I tried that before and ran into issues due to the fact that synology's btrfs implementation has quite a few patches. I forgot exactly what issues I had, just ymmv.

The fact that synology's btrfs is incompatible with a normal linux distribution and that the official instructions from synology for reading it is to use an older kernel together with ubuntu 16.04 lts convinced me to switch away from synology.

I believe that Ubiquiti advertises that they use zfs.

The Synology web UI lets you mount a remote SMB share and copy files directly in their file manager without making the round-trip via your PC, I imagine this would have been the fastest method without getting bogged down in command-line tools.

I love this kind of step-by-step solving post, but it bothers me that the author didn't track down what the JPEG in the Alternate Data Stream (ADS) was for. Something put it there... Might it be a surprise when it ends up not being there later?

Also, it kinda sounds like the UNAS might not be supporting ADS' for some reason? That alone could be a problem later on...

Yes, I certainly wouldn't have just skipped past ADS not working. Since samba and zfs support it, this is weird that Ubiquiti wouldn't. If this isn't just a config problem, I would call it cause to return the device.

"Ideally you'll find more value in the comments as Hacker News folks and Windows experts will drop in with better tools and strategies."

I don't know if this is better, but...an alternative is rclone, which uses rsync under the hood. It can also do parallel jobs and is restartable on any failed partial copy.

When I've had to do large Synology-to-Synology moves, that's what I've used. The multiple rsyncs in parallel really helps if you've got a lot of small files.

Does anyone know if the UNAS range uses ZFS as well or does it use BTRFS or something else?

I only know their higher end enterprise range specifically said ZFS but all the others doesn't seems to mention it. And I really wish there is a simple 4 bay ZFS NAS.

He should've given bvckup2 a try.

Asynchronous IO, multithreaded for smaller files, serialized when they are big, block-level delta copying on subsequent runs. Pretty much as fast as it gets on Windows.

Has anyone found a solution to lack of encryption in unas?

I bought several cameras and they unvr early this year. It works great but I have no AI features because you have to buy they hardware just to accept some license (!). I mean... OK but no.

If they would allow me to send them email saying: "I hereby promise I wont record my neighbours having little tete-a-tete."

Sure I understand liability. But requiring consumer to buy another product to fully utilize they other product? Sorry but no. They have really cool hardware and nice UI but policy like that... no.

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