Diskstation

The Story of Plex Back on my DiskStation

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My Intel NUC i5 inexplicably died in late February 2022. I am not sure if it was the main board or the power supply. I got a new power supply on eBay and that did not fix the issue so it was an internal component. I was not sure if the computer is fried or it’s an easy fix. So after procrastinating a bunch I just gave up on it. It was likely a lot of effort to fix or just toast anyway.

Until I can either replace or fix the NUC I needed somewhere to run my Plex Media Server. As luck would have it I already had an instance of Plex running on a Raspberry Pi 4. It couldn’t transcode but it worked ok. It was not a real replacement for the NUC.

Instead I installed Plex (again) on my Synology Diskstation. I hadn’t run Plex on my Diskstation in years. The main reason was both my backup software Resilio & Plex running on my Synologu DS422+ at the same time would crash it with out of memory errors. After some testing I was not able to replicate the failed state with both software now. I am not sure what I am doing differently or if one or both apps improved memory management. I was able to get them to coexist. For now that means my Plex lived on my diskstation.

Then in October my Synology Diskstation DS412+ had a power failure. The array was degraded. The Diskstation was over 10 years old by then. I made the decision to upgrade to a new Diskstation DS920+. I also upgraded drives to give myself approximately 35tb vs the 10 I had previously. Luckily the array was degraded on the DS412+ however not totally destroyed. I was able to mount 3 of the 4 original drives in the new Diskstation and then over a few weeks one by one replace and expand the array with the new bigger drives.

I have been running on the new Diskstation for a few months now with no issue. The Dikstation with all the apps I use only averages 25% CPU, and with 8 gig RAM only on average is using about 1/3 of that. I can go bigger on the RAM if I want to so I have some room to grow. The hardware transcoding on the DS920+ is why I chose that NAS over others. I have not been disappointed so far. The only annoyance was less than a week after I bought the DS920+ the DS923+ came out. I had waited so long to buy a new one in the first place hoping the new model would come out only to finally get one after giving up on the 22 models then have a new one come out straight away. A small consolation is the reviews of the new device are mixed so I may have been lucky to get the old one.

Containerizing My Media Center

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Back in February when my family went on vacation I spent a lot of time playing around with Docker. I converted several applications I was running on raspberry pi’s to run in Docker containers on my Synology Diskstation.

The challenge I gave myself was could I set up the containers to run on the NAS (The Diskstation) while at the same time being able to run them on my Mac mini as a backup in case there was any problems. That meant I needed to figure out how to replicate the configuration information between the devices.

I solve that challenge by setting up a new Resilio Sync folder for all of my Docker config’s. In most cases there was little to no reconfiguration needed to have those config files work on the NAS or the Mac mini. It wasn’t a super elegant solution since it did require human intervention however switching between systems was not something I intended to do often.

I did run into problems getting Plex to run as a container. I was having performance issues in general running Plex on my NAS. My solution was to setup Plex on my Mac mini as a native app. At some point I want to go back and figure out how to get Plex working in a container. Even when I do that I will still need to build a new machine to host it on. The Diskstation just doesn’t have the power to run Plex and my sync application at the same time anymore.  Even with the 4gig I upgraded the disk station to a year or so ago is now not enough.. For now I can continue to use Plex on my Mac. Longer-term I have bought components to build myself a Linux application server to host all of my containers so I can make my disk station just host files.

My Personal Private vs Public Cloud Debate

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I have been pondering my 321 Backup strategy for several months now.  Even before I had a near catastrophic issue with my Sinology DiskStation back in April I knew I wanted a more robust data management plan for my personal files.  I had been using the Sinology Cloud Station software but in my original configuration I was limited since all my data centered around my apartment.  This is convenient but not the safest approach.  I also only really had 2 copies of most of my data.  A really rock solid strategy has 3 copies across 2 sites, and if possible different media types.  I knew i wasn’t doing things good enough.

One solution I toyed around with was BitTorrent Sync.  Back in March I tried it out and had big problems with the UI on my desktop and the web interface on my DiskStation not loading regularly.  I didn’t feel the solution was ready for me to use yet.  I wasn’t confident in the Cloud Station software anymore since I ran into a data integrity issue with it in March.  I had uploaded photos I took in march and noticed that they hadn’t gotten to my Diskstation when they were saying they were syncing off my Desktop.  To make things more confusing the files were syncing to my laptop but not the Diskstation.

That problem lead me to the BitTorrent Sync option and the decision to upgrade to a beta version of the Synology software.  That in turn lead me to some problems I had an my near fatal event with the Diskstation.  So basically in a mission to solve my backup strategy problem i caused an event that a better backup strategy would have solved.

My near loss of all my data on the DiskStation was my wake up call that I needed to really figure some working solution out.  After I recovered (barely) from that incident I focused large amounts of time on solving data strategy.

After my trust was shaken with the Cloud Station data integrity problems I experienced I began to look at public cloud solutions.  I am very concerned about security so I discounted many public cloud providers.  Dropbox, and pretty much any American based solution is just not trustworthy with todays laws.  Dropbox employee’s can even get into your files if they need to regardless of the safeguards they claim to have I do not want anyone being able to get into my stuff unless I let them in.  That security concern lead me to MEGA.  They weren’t US based and they don’t have a way into your data.  Their plans were more expensive than most cloud providers however their 2TB plan more than covered my needs.

One downside was that MEGA didn’t have any built in backup solution for the Diskstation.  That meant I could backup my data to the cloud but the Diskstation wouldn’t be my main data source.  I could still use it as a home server but not the home of my data.  I wasn’t really pleased about that however I couldn’t really find an alternative that worked.  So earlier this spring I jumped into using MEGA as my cloud sync / backup solution.  It had a lot of what i wanted but it wasn’t perfect. It was the best of what was available that worked for me.

I spend a few weeks seeding and confirming my data was correct in MEGA before trying to make a sync copy onto my Laptop.  That was when I ran into issues.  What i noticed was after a while syncing files I would get to a point were the MEGA agent would freeze.  Sometimes after only 70-100 files downloaded.  I would restart the agent and it would do the same thing and copy a few more files and then stop.  I couldn’t really figure it out.  I tried reinstalling, putting the agent on another machine, checking their online help but i was unsuccessful at finding a solution.  This was an issue on top of a general annoyance I had were it would take 5-10 minutes for my admin page on the MEGA site to load.  I don’t know what it was doing but in any browser (chrome, firefox, or safari) i would have the same issue.  that wasn’t a show stopper however add to it that i can’t download a replica of my data onto my laptop I was very concerned.

After a week of tinkering I gave up and had no choice but to revert my decision and go back to Cloud Station software by Synology.  I didn’t want to bother calling MEGA.  I had a confidence issue and even if they could fix the issue in 10 minutes with my level of technical knowledge and online tools i should be able to figure it out.  If i can’t i have concerns about their service.  It wasnt like my problem was complex.  The system just stopped syncing data after a few files.

I wasn’t pleased however MEGA was never the perfect solution for me.  I knew that going into it but thought i could make it work.  In the end I couldn’t so I went back to Diskstation as my primary data store and used Cloud Station to sync.  I kept an eye on the data i synced to make sure i didnt have a repeat issue.  My plan to build another DiskStation and leave it with a friend was back on the table.  That was until about a week ago.

I don’t know what got me to look at BitTorrent Sync again however I installed it again.  I knew they were actively releasing newer versions so I had hoped that what happened the last time was an issue that was solved after a few months.  I was pleasantly surprised to see after some brief testing that the UI display issues appeared to be solved.  I slowly over a few days turned off syncing via Cloud Station and enabled BitTorrent Sync.  I made backups before my changes just in case.  The UI consistently worked on the desktop.  For the web interface on the DiskStation what i learned was first safari wasn’t so great for it.  Second that clearing my cookies for the site typically solved the issue.  With that issue resolved I moved most of my shares over to the BitTorrent Sync app within a week.  I was originally going to try out the system for 30 days and then decide if i wanted to pay for the Pro version.  After going over the 10 share limit for the trial i opted to pay for the 1 year Pro for $39.

As of right now I have my desktop, DiskStation NAS and laptop all replicating data with the new Sync software.  I am at a steady state like were i was back in March.  This steady state took a lot of research and trial and error however now is the harder part.  Now I need to finish this project and meet my objective of a true private cloud with data located in multiple locations.

Using BitTorrent Sync gives me a few options I didn’t have with the Synology centric Cloud Station.  My remote backup locations do not need to have a DiskStation.  I have two old Mac Mini’s that I could provision with external hard drives and drop them in remote locations.  That was my original idea at least. Now I am thinking bolder and cheaper.  If I am successful I will have a prototype to talk about soon.