Dear friends! Can you recommend me the brand or model of NAS, which have a best compartibility with Syncthing? I searched on this forum and found that not all devices are fully compartible or need additional manual setting up after install (chmod etc). I am a Windows user without good Linux skills.
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Not a lot of reaction… So here is my experience.
I run a 4 bay Qnap and syncthing is available in the app center.
I 'm use to run linux, I don’t remember if I had to type commands in a terminal or not to make it run.
I know from one of my nodes that it’s available on Synology too.
And another runs it on a Raspberry pi.
Maybe check the app center of the nas you consider to use to be sure.
Could always keep it simple and go with what you know. One could use an old Windows machine with a two extra hard drives setup with Windows Storage Spaces (super easy way to do a RAID on Windows) as a network attached storage device. RAID is basically two disks or more serving redundant data so one hard drive failure doesn’t kill your data.
Since you are already familiar with Windows you might also find it very easy to setup shared folders this way too.
Here is a link to learn more about Windows Storage Spaces: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/10/storage-spaces-explained-a-great-feature-when-it-works/
I went the easy way as my dev skills are limited. I have a network of some Synology Disks who have this pretty nice preinstalled OS in which SyncThing can be installed as well.
For about 1.5 yrs now, I’m running a 137GB sync directory without many problems in 3 different physical locations.
Thank you for your answer, can you describe, which OS you are using on Synology for Syncthing?
hi Ildar, of course. Synology disks by default come with DSM installed.
Ok, I got it - any Sinology drive with DSM OS can install ST as servive.
From my personal experience, I would not recommend the smaller (low end, one drive) QNAPs. They tend to get very, very slow when Syncthing is managing lots of files (in the hundreds of thousands) OR very large files.
The implementation of Syncthing for the low end QNAP CPUs is done by a single person. This is a risk to the extent that if he has no time (or if something would happen to him) a newer version of Syncthing could be delayed or not released at all. Being stuck with an older version, maybe with security problems or bugs could be problematic.
The way Syncthing is implemented on my QNAPS also means it’s running as root with no way to change that. Apart from being a security risk (and a nuisance since the Syncthing developers are adamant on reminding about this again and again) this also means that files sync’ed will always be owned by root and thus unavailable to other users on the QNAP. There are workarounds, but they should not be necessary in the first place.
Since the internet is a hostile place, allow me to repeat: This is my personal experience with low end QNAPs. I can provide more information or details if you are interested. FWIW: A friend with a low end Synology has a better experience.
Thank you for your answer, I’ll serach for midrange NAS (for office).
I can recommend a QNAP (TS-251+ in my case). But every device with a little bit of power and the ability to run docker container should do the job. This feature is called Container Station by QNAP.
I was able to run the official docker image of syncthing. Just mount the folder /var/syncthing to a folder on the NAS, set the network of the container to host-mode and there you go.
FreeNAS website has an existing plugin to support SyncThing already and uses ZFS, which as IMHO the best filesystem especially for a NAS. Right now the plugin is of 0.14.3, but should be upgraded to 0.14.44] pretty soon.
The SyncThing plugin for FreeNAS is setup to use the SyncThing auto update.
+1 for FreeNAS
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Same with the autoupdate on Qnap 
Hello, I am having the issue of files belonging to root on my QNAP. Could you please point me to the workarounds on how to solve this issue? Thank you.
Could you please point me to the workarounds on how to solve this issue?
Not really with a good conscience. I have two friends with the same small QNAPs and each of us has a different solution. FWIW Since my QNAP is used purely as a backup device in its own VLAN, with no way to access the internet (which forces me to update syncthing manually), I have a cron task running chmod on the appropriate files and folders to change the permissions, though that can’t be recommended to anybody.
Synology also has problems with permissions. There is a Syncthing app for Synology but it only works for the simplest single-user scenario. Even if you did manage to run Syncthing under an alternate non-root userid, Synology userid’s start at 1024 (!) which makes ID mapping difficult. Avoid turn-key NAS systems if you have any complexity in your setup. Their non-standard modifications to Linux are difficult to work around. I would think that FreeNAS is more flexible.
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Dumb question but I am not seeing the Syncthing app in my QNAP app center? Is it downloadable elsewhere or it works in conjunction with another app?
Not dumb at all. It took me quite a while to find that myself and piece together the details. The source for all this can be found here: father_mande. That is the french guy that made it all possible.
The installation instructions were a mess. Maybe its better now. From what I remember out of my head (and thats about four years past):
- you ssh into the QNAP
- download the pkg
- unpack it
- install the pkg with the QNAP GUI
and after that the plugin
a) is available in the QNAP GUI like all others
b) updates itself continuously (it has from version 0.11 all the way to 14.46) and survives QNAP upgrades without any problems. in short: once installed it runs forever.
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i run syncthing on freenas on a hp microserver gen 8 with 4x 4tb hdd’s and a zfs raidz (resulting in 10 TB usable space + lz4 compression)
works quite well. would recommend it.
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Hey Robert, I try to install Syncthing on my TS-251. I created the container. But when i go to the Webinterface i get the following warnings: 2019-12-06 22:12:13: Failed to create folder root directory mkdir /Sync: permission denied
2019-12-06 22:12:13: Error on folder “Default Folder” (default): folder path missing
Do you know whats wrong? I made a folder on DataVol1 where i´d like to store my date. but i`m not sure how to mount /var/syncthing correctly can you help me?