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ZoppoFlag for Germany

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BitTorrent Sync on Synology NAS stops syncing

Hello Experts,

I have problems with BitTorrent Sync on Synology NAS: I have two identical NAS (Synology DS 214, Version DSM 6.1.3-15152 Update 3) where I configured BitTorrent Sync Package (Version 2.3.7-1) to synchronize data between two distant locations.

This worked fine for some months, but recently I found one of the two NAS fails to send new files to the other one. The NAS where it fails contains quite a lot of data (lots more than the other one), the synchronized data (one shared folder) it's about 870 GB, 370000 files in 23500 directories, overall there is about 1,1 TB, 520000 files in 39000 directories - the filesystem is EXT4.

I checked the BitTorrent log and found a large amount of error messages like this:
[20170826 05:26:49.206] MC[1CCF] [18FC]: processing get_nodes message for /NAS_II/<Path>/<Filename>
[20170826 05:26:49.207] MC[1CCF] [18FC]: too many nodes to send 190671, stopping at /NAS_II/<Path>/<Filename>

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I searched for info about this message and found a hint this probably could be solved by increasing the  (https://forum.resilio.com/topic/40934-latest-destkop-build-214/) Max torrent metadata size in advanced preferences.

Question: Does anyone know if there may exist other reasons for these log messages?

Now I tried to change this but found there seems to be a problem with the settings files, it seems for any reason they're not updated after I changed the settings (via BitTorrent Sync's WebGui), when I view the settings after I changed them they look ok, but when I restart BitTorrent Sync and check the settings they're turned back to the values they had before.

I found the settings are stored in a file settings.dat, unfortunateley this is not a pure text file, it contains some binary data too so I don't think I can simply edit it. Unforuntateley I found when I remove this not only the preferences are reset, even the configured data-paths/connections are lost.

I want to avoid the need to setup this anew, especially as long as I don't know if the problem with changing preferences persists.

Does anyone know if there's a chance to get WebGui make updating the settings files correctly? Or if there's probably another way to modify these settings/setting files, i.e. with a command line tool?

Any help is highly apreciated,

thanks in advance,

ZOPPO


[edited/added] I found out following additional facts:

- the problem with the unsaved changes appears on both NAS, but unfortunateley I cannot say if the problem started at the same time (which could be an indicator it could be a problem with a recently installed software update of either DSM ot BitTorrent Sync)

- when I remove a connection to a shared Folder on one NAS it keeps removed even after restarting btsync as expected, BUT I cannot add the same connection to the same folder, the WebGui stops after selecting this folder with a message 'Selected folder is already added to Sync' (even after I deleted the '.sync' folder) - so it became even more inconsistent.
Avatar of Jackie Man
Jackie Man
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It is a complicated question even for the experts.

Are the two NAS in the same timezone? Have you made sure the date and time of both NAS are correct?

Have you done a disk check?
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ASKER

Hi Jackie Man,

yes, I know, it's not that I'm a beginner, I really tried a lot, but now I have no more ideas.

Yes, the NAS exist in the same timezone (in fact they're in the same street, about 1 km distance. Time is synchronised correctly with the same time server.

And yes, I run fsck on both NAS successfully, in the first run it reported some errors, but I verified they were fixed with a second run.

JFI: I even opened a thread for this issue on the vendor's support forum: https://forum.resilio.com/topic/43660-bittorrent-sync-on-synology-nas-doesnt-save-modified-settings/

Best regards,

ZOPPO
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ASKER

Two more things I'd like to mention:

1. It is only one folder where the synchronization fails, there are two other folders, located on the other NAS, which are synchronized fine.

2. My main problem is not the failing synchronization, it's the fact I'm not able to change any settings and to clean remove existing connections.
Understand your pain, but normally it is not easy to tackle the sync problem if there are different users from both NAS to make change to the content inside the NAS.
The only workaround is to compare the difference in both NAS and make one of them as primary NAS and reset the other one and remove the sync and add a new one.
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ASKER

There's no general sync problem, it worked fine for at least one year, to avoid sync problems I configured it in a way each NAS is the server for one folder which is synchronized as read-only to the other NAS (so each NAS acts as kind of a server for the other NAS), a third folder is shared with read-write for bi-directional transfers, but we told the user to only use this if needed, and up to now we even had no problems with this configuration.

Further all users access the NAS with the same (guest-) account, so there's even usually no problem with user-rights.

Since as told above it's even not possible to remove a existing connection in a clean way I cannot (or better said I don't like to) solve this by just removing and recreating the connection since this would mean I have to change the folder's name - this would mean we have to change the used shares on all client PCs, this is a real lot of work.

So as far as I can see the only reasonable solution would be to reset and cleanup everything related to BtSync on both NASs and to re-create the original configuration from the scratch - but as long as I don't have any idea about the problem with the unsavable settings-modifications I would like to avoid this too, if the same happens again it's wasted time to re-set and rere-create everything.
Avatar of Zoppo

ASKER

Hello again,

with help from the Resilio support I found the version of BitTorrent Sync (2.3.7) I use it quite old (unfortunateley it's sill offered via PacketManager and shown as 'up to date), the tool now is called Resilio Sync (Version 2.5.7) and needs to be manually installed.

Unfortunateley as far as I can see it even has problems updating my settings.dat from the WebGUI, but Resilio suppert sent me a python script which can be used to retrieve and set values of any 'poser user preference' - with this tool I was able to reset all values to their defaults.

Now the synchronization seems to work, but I can't say it finally, because additionally we have problems with the network, the VPN tunnel between the two locations repeatedly breaks down every some minutes, so the synchronization process takes extremely long - I'm working on this problem - anyway, I already found some files which now are synchronized allthoug they weren't synchronized the last four weeks - that's good.

I'll keep you informed ...

Best regards,

ZOPPO
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