Extending Linux Photographic Workflow with a QNAP NAS
As is often the case, I’m late to the party. But after years of dealing with VPS and home-grown backup solutions, I finally took the plunge and invested in a dedicated Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliance. There are plenty of NAS brands and models to choose from, but after consulting with my highly knowledgeable colleagues and doing some research, I zeroed in on a QNAP appliance. Being a budget-conscious user, I opted for the two-bay TS-231P model. I equipped it with two Seagate IronWolf 1 TB hard disks. With only two disk bays, TS-231P offers the choice between RAID 0 and RAID 1. I went for the latter, preferring redundancy over speed.
Setting up TS-231P was a rather straightforward affair, and I had my NAS up and running in no time. Initially, I planned to move my digiKam library to the NAS and access my photos over the wireless network. Since TS-231P (as any other QNAP model running the QTS Linux-based operating system) supports all common protocols, including NFS, it was easy to mount NAS shares on my Linux machine. It was easy after I figured out how to solve the issue that prevented shares from being mounted. Whenever I tried to run the sudo mount -t nfs4 ipaddress:/share /mnt command on my openSUSE Tumbleweed system, I got the access denied error message. I had a suspicion that the error had something to do with the NFS host access permissions, but it took some digging around to find the right place to fix this.
Here is the solution. To change NFS access permissions for a specific directory, open Control Panel and switch to the Privileges > Shared Folders section. Press the Edit Shared Folder Permissions button next to the desired entry and select NFS host access from the Select permission type drop-down list. Enable the Access right option and configure access permissions as follows:
Press Apply to save the changes, and you should be able to mount the share on another machine on the network.
Now I was able to access my digiKam library stored on the NAS, but the wireless network turned out to be a real bottleneck. Any action in digiKam was followed by such a long lag that it made the entire setup pretty much unusable. So I had to revise my original plan, and stick with keeping the digiKam library on my machine and back it up to the NAS using the good old rsync. The latter, by the way, is enabled by default in QTS. The rsync command looks something like this:
rsync -avhz /path/to/local/dir/ admin@nas_ip_address:/share/homes/user/path/to/target/dirNote that the path to the user home directory in this case starts with /share/homes/USER (where USER is the actual QNAP user).
Speaking of backup, QNAP supports practically any backup scenario imaginable: from NAS-to-NAS replication, to backup to a variety of cloud services. Better still, the Hybrid Backup Sync makes it supremely easy to create and configure backup jobs. At the moment, my NAS runs two backup jobs. The first one is a two-way synchronization with Google Photos, while the second job backs up the data to Backblaze B2. It’s actually the first time I use Backblaze B2, learning about it from Kristian Köhntopp’s The Isoblog. So far, Backblaze B2 checks all the right boxes for me: it’s inexpensive, easy to set up, and has no annoying limitations. I also configured the backup button on the front panel of the TS-231P to back up the data on the NAS to an encrypted external hard disk.
Calling QNAP a NAS is actually a bit of an understatement. This is a versatile appliance that can be put to a variety of practical uses thanks to the comprehensive out-of-the-box functionality and a wide range of installable apps. Right now, I use my NAS to host a web-based RSS reader, password generator, and Mejiro-based photo gallery. But I plan to enlist my QNAP NAS to other duties, too.
