Sync using Synology Drive Station?

[andersennl]

Hi, the support documents advise to rather use Dropbox than Apple' iCloud Drive to sync Alfred's settings, as iCloud Drive has problems detecting changes inside packages, which I can confirm. I'm wondering though if anyone has experience using the Synology NAS' Drive Station to sync such a file and if it works reliable.

 

Thanks

Edited February 19, 2020 by andersennl

[Andrew]

@andersennl Alfred keeps live references open to files in his preferences, so expects them to both be always available, and fast. As such, it's not ideal to set the sync location to a remote volume, as if this drive were to not be available on startup, or disappear during Alfred's operation, then you could expect some issues in Alfred.

 

One option could be to setup rsync between Alfred's preferences and your Synology NAS. This way, Alfred's preferences would be local, but you could rsync a copy out to the Synology every time a preference changes.

 

Cheers,

Andrew

[andersennl]

Hi @Andrew and thank you for your answer. Sorry I just realized that my question was a bit vague. Actually I was thinking of syncing a folder instead of using a network drive. Is that what you meant by rsync?

[deanishe]

1 hour ago, andersennl said:

Is that what you meant by rsync?

 

Yes. rsync is a command-line sync tool. It doesn't do two-way sync, though. So if you're syncing your preferences between multiple Macs, it would be up to you to decide which preferences to overwrite.

[andersennl]

I've been doing some testing with Synology Drive, and so far everything works without any problems. Snippets for instance sync very well.

[Andrew]

@andersennl would you mind sharing a little more info about how you're achieving this, as it may help others. Are you using Synology Drive Client?

[andersennl]

Sure, I'm using Synology Drive Client (it can be downloaded here: https://www.synology.com/de-de/support/download/DS216j#utilities). It's the counterpart to Synology Drive Server, which needs to be installed on a Synology NAS.

 

One thing I especially like is that you can specify multiple folders to be synchronized, where you can set for each one separately if you want to sync dotfiles. This is great for syncing folders which solely contain config-dotfiles.

Edited February 26, 2020 by andersennl

[Jono]

I also do this with a few different app's libraries/settings via the Synology Drive client 👍

[Andrew]

Thanks! I may give this a go

[TomBenz]

On 2/21/2020 at 7:50 PM, deanishe said:

 

Yes. rsync is a command-line sync tool. It doesn't do two-way sync, though. So if you're syncing your preferences between multiple Macs, it would be up to you to decide which preferences to overwrite.

Is rsync doing incremental backup only?