Over the years I have accumulated a sizable music library (mostly flacs, adding up to a bit less than 1TB) that I now want to reorganize (ie. gradually process with Musicbrainz Picard).
Since the music lives in my NAS, flacs are relatively big and my network speed is 1GB, I insalled on my computer a hdd I had laying around and replicated the whole library there; the idea being to work on local files and the sync them to the NAS.
I setup Syncthing for replication and… everything works, in theory.
In practice, Syncthing loves to rescan the whole library (given how long it takes, it must be reading all the data and computing checksums rather than just scanning the filesystem metadata - why on earth?) and that means my under-powered NAS (Celeron N3150) does nothing but rescanning the same files over and over.
Syncthing by default rescans directories every hour (again, why on earth?), but it still seem to rescan a whole lot even after I have set rescanIntervalS to 90 days (maybe it rescans once regardless when restarted?).
Anyway, I am looking into alternatives.
Are there any you would recommend? (FOSS please)
Notes:
- I know I could just schedule a periodic rsync from my PC to the NAS, but I would prefer a bidirectional solution if possible (rsync is gonna be the last resort)
- I read about unison, but I also read that it’s not great with big jobs and that it too scans a lot
- The disks on my NAS go to sleep after 10 minutes idle time and if possible I would prefer not waking them up all the time (which would most probably happen if I scheduled a periodic rsync job - the NAS has RAM to spare, but there’s no guarantee it’ll keep in cache all the data rsync needs)
Syncthing should have inotify support which allows it to watch for changes rather than polling. Does that help?
Yep, this is how I do it on my NAS, which is some RockPro64 board attached to WD Red spin drives. I have music, movies, game saves, documents, pics, etc. that equal around 1.5TB and I don’t seem to get excess scanning when “watch files” is turned on.
Yes, Syncthing does watch for file changes… that’s why I am so puzzled that it also does full rescans :)
Maybe they do that to catch changes that may have been made while syncthing was not running… it may make sense on mobies, where the OS like to kill processes willy-nilly, but IMHO not on a “real” computer
Is it worth raising an issue with the project? Also enable logging to see if there are any clues as to why a rescan is being done?
You can set it to do full scans however often you like, even monthly.
Or to catch if you start in a different OS and make changes to files that are then not tracked.
Nothing wrong with rsync, it’s still kinda the shit. Short script, will do everything
https://git-annex.branchable.com/ this thing extends git to handling lots of big files. Probably a solid choice, haven’t tried, but it claims to do exactly what you need, and even has ui and partial sync
The use case sounds exactly like git-annex.
As a bonus you get a system that tracks how many copies of files and where you have them.
So git-annex should let you just pull down the files you want to work on, make your changes, then push them back upstream. No need to continuously sync entire collection. Requires some git knowledge and wading through git-annex docs but the walkthrough is a good place for an overview: https://git-annex.branchable.com/walkthrough/
Change the full-rescan interval to monthly, or yearly even, problem solved.
I suspect it’s somewhat inevitable, since in order to sync you need to know what’s the difference between files here and there (unless using smth like zfs send which should be able to send only the changes, I guess?). I’d probably tag everything at once and then sync
If a file has not been modified, why does it need to be scanned?
That’s if you don’t keep track of whether it was modified. It comes more or less for free if you’re the filesystem, but may be more complicated for external programs. Although, ?maybe inotifywait can track for changes to the whole directory, but I’m not sure here
Isn’t there a last modified time stamp on files?
Huh, didn’t think of that 😅
FreeFileSync detects moves and changes quickly without rereading the whole file. The first time you sync it will read every file to hash them first, this takes a long time but subsequent syncs will be fast.
Have you had a look at “Lucky Backup”?
Never heard of it… OMG that must be the worst name for a backup solution! :D
It reeks of abandoned software (last release is 0.50 from 2018), but there is recent activity in git, so… IDK
I wouldn’t consider it a backup solution, I use Timeshift for that.
It’s more of a file syncing software like Syncthing.
I have it set up to one way sync certain folders on my computer to an external USB HDD that I can disconnect and take with me if I have to evacuate.
“Unlucky Backup” is probably worse.
“Unreliable Backup” is probably the worse.
Wait, I have a better name. Duplicati!
I used seafile in the past. but I abandoned it for syncing. might help your use case …
I have a very similar setup to yours, a relatively large music library around 1.7TB of mostly flac files on my server. I’m able to organize these files locally from my laptop, which at various times has run either OSX, various GNU/Linuxes, or Windows. However I do not bother pushing the files themselves back and forth over the network.
Even if I did, I wouldn’t automate the syncing, I’d only run it manually after I’d done my organizing with Picard for that day. After all, it the organization with Picard isn’t automated, why should the syncing be? I’d probably use rsync for this.
In actual practice I do this: Connect to my server from my laptop using ssh, forwarding X. Run Picard on the actual server through this remote connection. Picard runs just fine over ssh. Opening a browser from a Picard tag for occasional Musicbrainz.org stuff is a little slower but works. I would then use a tmux or screen session to run the rsync command when I’m done with Picard for the day for syncing to a backup if necessary.
I don’t really bother keeping a whole copy of my music collection locally on my laptop or phone though, since It’s been bigger than is practical for a long time. Managing multiple libraries and keeping the two in sync turned into such a hassle that I was spending more time organizing than actually listening (or making mixtapes/playlists). To listen to my music locally I’ve used either Plex or Jellyfin, sometimes MPD (like when my server was directly connected to my stereo receiver), or just shared the folder via samba and NFS.
The main difference is probably that I have a desktop PC rather than a laptop (plus, a few old hard disks lying around).
I think I’ll keep the local replica even when I’m finished reorganizing the library: the local copy doubles as a backup and I must say I am enjoying the faster access times.
Oh yeah, I totally support the local copy. That will save you in times up hardware failure or fuck ups. I could just never keep up with the maintenance and kind of gave up making automatic backups and syncing. But reorganizing often translates to integrating deletions into rsync or whatever syncing protocol you use, and that has caused me headaches and heartaches.
