I use Beyond Compare to sync files from my laptop to my NAS which is a QNAP (my laptop is Linux Mint). It is incredibly slow, to the point that it is driving me crazy. Admittedly, I have lots of large files on my laptop that I move around frequently, so that may just be how it is. I do have my laptop setup to sync to my phone with Syncthing, and it seems like my phone is always up-to-date and in sync with my laptop. But of course it is syncing in, I guess, “real time” as opposed to a Beyond Compare backup which does everything only when I tell it to when lots of changes have already been made at the end of the day. Is it possible to install Syncthing on QNAP? Perhaps that would make things a bit faster, although I’ve always had a hell of a time trying to install something that isn’t a proprietary app from their store. Anyway, any suggestions are welcome.
EDIT: Plugging into ethernet instead of syncing over wi-fi helps speed things up a bit, but not as much as I would like.
Just spent 3 hours today with my stepmom trying to tame the “backup” situation on her work computer (a Mac). I’m just going to dump the (somewhat angry) rant I wrote my wife on the way home on the train:
Also on the To-do for next meeting:
set up a password manager, as her current system of manually copying her passwords (all of them the exact same 5-letter word, followed by the exact same 4-digit year, followed by one of 5 symbols, rotated for “security”) from last year’s paper calendar to this year’s paper calendar (with little or no notes about what they’re actually for) is … less than ideal.
install software (Eagle) to manage her ~600 GB collection of work image files, half of which are in folders in her Downloads folder, the other half living dangerously on that sketchy external drive, all of them in semi-randomly named folders with nothing even remotely resembling any sort of system.
copy the files on the current Rugged external drive to the new Rugged external drive so I can format the current one to a FS that can handle TimeMachine.
upgrade her OS so OneDrive can actually run, although I won’t be using it for “backup”, because:
setting up a proper cloud solution (B2) with proper backup software (Arq or Kopia) to make daily cloud backups of the primary external.
setting up her external drives (at that point two Rugged drives) so one does daily backups (CCC + TimeMachine), and the other does a weekly backup of the first one before getting locked in the safe, with primary also hosting all her images.
Wish me luck 🙄
Oh wow, what a nightmare. So lucky she has you, I’m always a little sad thinking how awful it must (and apparently is) be for people who don’t have resident nerd doing this kind of stuff for them.
Good luck!
Thank you 😊
I’m happy to help, and she wrote a very sweet message to say thanks, she was very happy 😁
And I’ll be very pleased once we get it all sorted. I left her computer copying the files from that sketchy drive to the other one, so at least, until I go back, there should be a bit of redundancy 👌
At least she’s receptive; recently had to help my dad set up a remote connection for his accountant so she could work from home while recovering from a broken ankle. His IT guy (a different one) had made him a Word doc with a guide for setting up the remote connection he had installed on her computer at the office. Username and password were right there in the doc, plaintext, sent by insecure email.
Told my dad that his entire office should be considered compromised, just to be on the safe side, as the remote connection basically allowed full access to his entire network. He’s a lawyer, so any intruder could cause serious harm if they got on there, ranging from ransomware encryption to compromising his clients’ confidentiality.
He shrugged it off, seemed “unlikely” to him. I tried to stress the the low likelihood didn’t in any way outweigh the potential damage (practically wrote an essay on the subject). Told him to at the very least get the IT guy to change the password. “Nah”.
Old people 🙄
* Picard facepalm *