HyperBackup and Amazon Drive

Amazon Drive is a cloudstorageservice that currently costs £55/year for UNLIMITED storage. They have a three month trial which I am currently testing with HyperBackup. Performance is pretty good. Alot better than Dropbox (atleast from here in Sweden). I've tried HyperBackup a bit with Google Drive but I've had a few issues where the backup stopped working (!). Bad news obviously but I'll try this for awhile and see what happens. My number one rule with HyperBackup is: * Do NOT cover your entire NAS with one backupjob if you've got lots of TB's of data. If something goes wrong, everything is lost. You can in theory "relink" from a new NAS if your current one is stolen/similar but relinking LARGE backupjobs takes alot of time (with GoogleDrive anyway). After 8hours or so I just gave up.

Plex and h.265 on DS415+

You might be familiar with h.264 encoded moviefiles. They usually play quite nicely on Plex if you're streaming to, for example, iOS devices. The files doesn't need to be transcoded at all (there are exceptions..) and they require minimum CPU-load on your NAS. However, h.265-encoded files are quite new and, to make a long story short, h.265 creates smaller files than h.264 with equal or better quality. If you want to tryout h.265 encoding I recommend "Handbrake". However, be sure you've got a pretty fast CPU. Anyway. Plex in most cases today requires transcoding of h.265 material (iOS devices doesn't support h.265-video at the time I write this for example). I've done some experimenting with h.265 and can safely say that Plex on my DS415+ can properly transcode and stream h.265 DVD-rips to my iOS-devices. I've tried quite a few and had no issues. It causes heavyload on the NAS so don't expect several streams at the same time to work. I've tried a few 1080p h.265-files but the NAS isn't fast enough to deal with it. So, if you're ripping your DVD-collection to be playable in Plex, feel free to try out h.265!

How to speedup DSM SHR volume expansion

The SHR volume expansion is very slow, it'll take days if you're adding a few more TB's. However there are some shortcuts that might improve things atleast a little bit. As usual, try these tricks at your own risk.
1) Enable SSH, and login using Putty with your admin-account
2) Switch to rootaccount by typing "sudo su -" and then type your admin-password. You should now be logged in as "root".
3) Type one row at a time and hit enter:
echo 50000 >/proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_min
echo 16384 >/sys/block/md2/md/stripe_cache_size

I am no Unix-guru, but this obviously has something to do with diskcaching related to volume expansion. You'll notice that volume expansion will go atleast a little bit faster. I've tried this on my DSM 6.0.1 (DS415+) and it worked.

Moving packages between volumes

Synology doesn't currently have any official tools for migrating packages between volumes so you have to do it yourself if required. Most packages are pretty intelligent and allows you to uninstall without removing the actual data, so you can simply uninstall the package, select NOT to remove the data and then install the package again on your desired volume. But a few packages requires more work. However, follow my guidelines on your own risk.
MariaDB - before moving, open the package and click the button to move your database to your new volume. When that's done, uninstall MariaDB and install it again to your new volume (same that you put your databases).
BTSync - Cannot be moved properly without loosing settings. Be sure to write down all your keys/settings before moving.
Plex - Seems pretty intelligent. You can move your movie-directories to other volumes without Plex going nuts.
Webstation - All webstation settings are lost during uninstall so be sure to writedown all your virtual hosts etc before doing this.

How to downgrade DSM firmware

I was bored of that phpVirtualbox refused to work on DSM 6.0.1 so I tried downgrade the firmware to DSM 6.0. The following procedure worked for me without data-loss. However be sure to backup your stuff and do this on your own risk. I got this from Synology forum and I've slightly changed it. The downgrade process complained about Plex and BTSync wasn't compatible with DSM 6.0 but all I had to do was to shut then down before the upgrade and then turn them on again afterwards and everything worked fine.

Use Putty, and SSH login to your NAS using the ADMIN account.

Enter the command "SUDO SU", press enter. Enter password .. the one for your ADMIN account

You now have "root" status, if everything went well.

With root status you can edit /ect.defaults/VERSION
(Enter "VI /ect.defaults/VERSION")
Change content to something just prior to the version you wish to downgrade to ..

Example:

majorversion="5"
minorversion="2"
buildphase="hotfix"
buildnumber="5640"
smallfixnumber=3
builddate=2015/12/17
buildtime="18:26:46"

Save, exit Putty, Visit DSM-upgrade panel ..