Scripts and tips for improving the operation of Syncthing on a Synology Diskstation

Syncthing is a cross platform tool for syncing files to other machines in real time. More information is available from the official website syncthing.net.

Syncthing can be installed from https://synocommunity.com/, but it poses two big problems.

• On ds1515 the binary would not run
• The package did not include the syncthing-inotify binary, which watches changes in files. Without it, every shared directory is fully checked on a schedule. This is not only a waste of time, but also process intensive.

As of version 0.14.47, Syncthing now includes a file watcher built-in. It will also be enabled by default and you don't want to enable syncthing-inotify in that case. I am still in the process of testing it myself. So far it seems to work just as well as syncthing-inotify. I would probably recommend using it, since it requires less configuration than inotify. With my large data set I haven't received any errors besides the common insuficient permissions. I doubt that was related to the watcher, though. I will retain the following steps in case you can't upgrade for some reason or you choose to go this route instead. Syncthing documentation on file scanning

Update! My current version of Syncthing is version 1.0.0. I have been running the native Syncthing file watcher since version 0.14.47 with no ill effects. Still my favorite sync util!

To fully appreciate syncthing. Follow these steps. (Mind you, I have tested this on ds1515, and ds412+. If you update the synocommunity package these modifications will be removed and you'll need to repeat these steps. Your data is your data and if it's important to you. You should have backups and test new processes on test data. If you don't take the right precautions and wipe out your data that's your problem.)

• Download the appropriate syncthing binary from syncthing.net. Your Synology architecture can be discovered from this page What kind of CPU does my NAS have
• Copy the syncthing binary over the one in /var/packages/syncthing/target/bin
• Download the appropriate syncthing-inotify binary from github. Again, choose the one for your Synology architecture.
• Copy the syncthing-inotify binary to /var/packages/syncthing/target/bin
• Finally, copy the start-stop-status script in this repo to /var/packages/syncthing/scripts/