Advice For Syncing Large Amount Of Data

[Shaav]

Here's the situation:

 

I have had two QNAP NAS ("Q1" & "Q2") drives syncing happily for 7 months using 1.4; just over 2TB of data (about 650K files). This last week I wanted to add two more QNAPs to the mix ("Q3" and "Q4"). They have 2.0 installed.  (For the time being, I have reasons for not wanting to upgrade Q1 and Q2 although will if necessary).

 

I pre-copied over all of the data from Q1 to Q3 and Q4 which are all on the same LAN. Q2 is still in the swarm but over the internet. I set up the syncing; everything seemed to be OK. However the indexing was taking *forever* --- 3 days and it only seemed to be maybe half done --- so I thought it might just be faster to remove the data from Q3 and Q4 and then let them sync from Q1 (and Q2); downloading seems to be faster than indexing.

 

I stopped btsync on Q3; deleted the date I had copied over; started btsync again and everything seemed to be going OK; stuff was starting to copy over; so I did the same with Q4; again everything seemed to be working OK. Q1 started behaving a little oddly; couldn't get the GUI to load and the others were showing it offline. Finally it came back; didn't think much of it.

 

Then I discovered that most of the files had been deleted from Q1. In retrospect, I guess because of deleting stuff from Q3/Q4; probably everything that *had* been indexed got deleted.

 

Sort of a no biggie, because everything is still in the .sync/Archive HOWEVER, I have a couple of questions on how to proceed.

 

1. Best way to restore from .sync/Archive? Is there a way for me to identify the newest version of the files and not restore all the previously deleted ones?

 

2. It looks like all the timestamps have been updated to the delete times. :[  Don't much care about that with Q3 and Q4, but what's going to happen with Q2?  Is it going to try and reupload all 2TB to Q2 because they have new timestamps? Or will it recognize that the hashes are the same?

 

3. Which is the better (i.e. faster) approach on a LAN? Prepopulating the share with rsync and then letting them index or syncing all 2TB using btsync?

 

4. What should I delete on Q3 and Q4 to make sure this doesn't happen again?

 

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!