au Qua Station - Part 8B -Tips & Tricks - Logging and Resilio Sync Advanced Settings

Remove Spurious Warnings/Errors from the Log Files

 Given that I am booting from SD Card or USB stick on some of the machines, and I don't want them to die prematurely from stupid log messages, I had a look at this question and implemented the suggestion given there:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/30219/can-i-block-log-messages-from-specific-devices-or-drivers

Specifically, I created a /home/log/ folder, which has a junk.log file.

Some messages that appear a lot, but I don't care about are redirected there for posterity.

Since /home is on a spinning HDD in most case, this is a better place to put these.

Now that I think about it, /dev/nul might be even better.  

 

GeekBench on QuaStation

I also discovered that GeekBench for ARM does work on the QuaStation without issues.  

Here is a sample result.

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/11099816

The single core score is 133, while the multi-core score is 438, so... roughly 1/10th the speed of a new M1 Macbook Air.  Hardly a fair comparison, I know.  

The QuaStation was designed to be as cheap as possible while having enough power to manage a disk. 

Resilio Sync Power User Settings:

Max File Size for Versioning

The default here is 1000MB (1GB)

This means that things like movie files will be actually deleted on the remote machine if you accidentally delete them on the local machine, with no recovery option.  I changed this to 100000MB (100GB), which should encompass any file I have.

Sync Trash TTL

This setting is used to determine how long to keep files that have been deleted in the archive folder.  This default to 30 days, but I have changed to 365 days.  

I am using resilio-sync as an online backup, and I don't normally delete files,  so it makes sense to be protective of them in this sense.  The files I would delete would be smaller ones, so keeping them around a while won't harm anything.

As an example, let's say you delete a file on your laptop.  You meant for it only to be a local deletion to free up space on your laptop, but it ended up being interpreted as a command to delete everything from all of the devices.  Because they were large files, they were deleted without archiving.  You don't notice this until 2 months later.  You want to download a movie file from one of your projects but - gasp - the folder is empty on all of the servers!  What happened!? you may ask - but it's probably too late.  Making sure even large files are archived, and keeping the archive for a year can help with this issue.  You can always manually prune an archive in the rare case that would be needed. 

Another option would be to use BTRFS snapshot capabilities, which will save files from issues not solvable by the above, but require you to understand some of how BTRFS works.  

LAN Encrypt Data

This setting means that data is encrypted while in transit between your machines, even inside your local network.  This is enabled by default in Resilio Sync as a safety feature.

Ordinarily, my opinion is that all transfers should be encrypted at the application level, so that things like WiFi encryption are not necessary.  In this case, though, given that I do use encrypted WiFi, and I am not so concerned about the NSA sniffing my ethernet signals, I may opt to disable this given that it causes additional CPU load which slows down the transfer on slower machines like the QuaStations I am using.  

Prioritize Initial Indexing

The description for this setting is that it is useful for directories with millions of files.  I don't have any such directories, so it makes sense to turn this off, so the file transfer can proceed while the indexing continues.

Folder Rescan Interval

This setting is used by Resilio Sync to tell it how often to re-scan the drive to pick up any changes missed by the real-time file monitoring.  The default value of 600 seconds equates to 10 minutes.   

Given that I am using the QuaStations as servers, it would be very rare indeed to make changed on the devices themselves.  Therefore, I changed this value from 600 to 6000, which means a rescan every 100 minutes.  This is still many times a day, which is not really necessary. 

Peer Expiration Days

If you open ResilioSync and go to Settings → Identity, it will show a list of peers.  These will show with a freen dot next to them, and a grey dot if they are not.  If a peer isn't seen for a while, it will be assumed to be dead and eventually removed from the list.  This makes sense if you are sharing folders to random people, but if you are using your own servers that are meant to be online all the time, then having the "dead" peers show up on the list is very useful to tell at a glance which peers are down.  By default, peers that havn't connected for 7 days are forgotten.  You can modify this to your liking, so I changed it to 99 days.  

Note: There is a description of all of the power user options here.