Btrfs and iphoto on mac

[daptap]

Two questions. Trying to help my friend set up his 218+. I've set up 1 NAS before: my 718+. So, still shooting in the dark some.

1) He formatted his 4TB red drive to btrfs. I've read some old search results that windows has trouble seeing this. Should we be able to see the map the NAS drive from windows explorer if the NAS if formatted with BTRFS?

2) His wife has a mac and uses iphoto. I've read there are issues with putting storing the pictures on the NAS and trying to use iphoto on the mac to manage. Has anyone successfully navigated this and have this working as described?

Thanks!

 

[fredbert]

1) He formatted his 4TB red drive to btrfs. I've read some old search results that windows has trouble seeing this. Should we be able to see the map the NAS drive from windows explorer if the NAS if formatted with BTRFS?

Are you implying that you can't see it from Windows Explorer?

As I haven't used btrfs yet I can't say one way or the other. But when accessing NAS shares you aren't mounting the physical disk on the PC but are getting a folder structure managed by the file sharing service (AFP, SMB, NFS). My Mac won't read/write Ext4 but it can fully access the NAS using AFP, SMB, and WebDAV, plus SFTP mounted via third party apps.

2) His wife has a mac and uses iphoto. I've read there are issues with putting storing the pictures on the NAS and trying to use iphoto on the mac to manage. Has anyone successfully navigated this and have this working as described?

Personally I don't use the NAS for primary storage of my Mac Photos library (or iPhoto when that was still alive). It's Apple's advice to only use Apple format disks (Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac). However, @Rusty does use the NAS for his primary storage.

 

[Rusty]

2) His wife has a mac and uses iphoto. I've read there are issues with putting storing the pictures on the NAS and trying to use iphoto on the mac to manage. Has anyone successfully navigated this and have this working as described?

You can do this by crating a sparse image on your mac and format it as HFS. Do NOT use APFS or it will not work on Mojave and Catalina. After you have created the image move it to your shared folder of choice on the NAS. After that mount the shared folder on the nas , then mount the image that you have created. Shut down iphoto/photos and move it to the mounted sparse image.

After that open up iphoto/photos using Option key and point your iphoto/photos to the new destination of your library.

Keep in mind that each time you wanna access your photos you will have to mount both the shared folder and the image containing your library.

 

[crkinard]

The file system on your NAS has nothing to do with how other computers see the data.

 

[fredbert]

The file system on your NAS has nothing to do with how other computers see the data.

Don't worry. I think this was a drive-by question.

 

[durin]

You can do this by crating a sparse image on your mac and format it as HFS. Do NOT use APFS or it will not work on Mojave and Catalina.

I meant to ask about this as I've seen you mention this before - is this because of an incompatibility issue with the OS, or more specifically with sparse images?

 

[fredbert]

Not sure if this is the reason (still) but here's some knowledgable stuff from a year or so ago macOS may lose data on APFS-formatted disk images | Carbon Copy Cloner | Bombich Software. Says it's resolved on Mojave but I'd err on the side of caution and HFS+ is tried and tested ... which is frightening as I remember when it was new and HFS was the file system of choice

 

[durin]

Wow, I was not aware of that - that’s a pretty serious bug!

Are time machine backups affected by it? They’re effectively sparse bundles on a synology NAS...

 

[Rusty]

I meant to ask about this as I've seen you mention this before - is this because of an incompatibility issue with the OS, or more specifically with sparse images?

That's hard for me to say. But I can say that APFS just simply won't mount on 10.14 and 10.15. As @fredbert said there are a few more companies that have confirmed this so I would advise caution.

I can confirm that HFS photos lib does work on Catalina (tested it today) just as it was working on all the previous versions of macOS.

 

[durin]

That's hard for me to say. But I can say that APFS just simply won't mount on 10.14 and 10.15. As @fredbert said there are a few more companies that have confirmed this so I would advise caution.

I can confirm that HFS photos lib does work on Catalina (tested it today) just as it was working on all the previous versions of macOS.

Interesting - is the mounting issue confined to sparse bundles, or are external physical drives also affected?

 

[Rusty]

Its just the combo of sparse image format and macos system, regardless of where the image is hosted

 

[jono]

You can do this by crating a sparse image on your mac and format it as HFS. Do NOT use APFS or it will not work on Mojave and Catalina. After you have created the image move it to your shared folder of choice on the NAS. After that mount the shared folder on the nas , then mount the image that you have created. Shut down iphoto/photos and move it to the mounted sparse image.

After that open up iphoto/photos using Option key and point your iphoto/photos to the new destination of your library.

Keep in mind that each time you wanna access your photos you will have to mount both the shared folder and the image containing your library.

Didn't you write a blog post on this? (thought I saw it in the past, but can't find it now)

I'll use the instructions here, but wanted to bookmark the blog post (if it exists) for future reference.

 

[Rusty]

Didn't you write a blog post on this? (thought I saw it in the past, but can't find it now)

I'll use the instructions here, but wanted to bookmark the blog post (if it exists) for future reference.

No, I haven't. I have used this method for well over 10y now and I haven't had my blog up that long. Could have been the old official Syno forum (legacy topic on the new community) post.

There is also a few years old topic on the same matter on the community one as well: Synology Community that covers the steps.

 

[jono]

Ah, I thought I'd seen a post from you in the past. Not to worry, I'll use your instructions here

 

[Robbie]

Wow, I was not aware of that - that’s a pretty serious bug!

Are time machine backups affected by it? They’re effectively sparse bundles on a synology NAS...

I regularly use TM backups from my Syno NASes to build macOS machines - zero issues.

(Well other than than the perennial macOS peculiarity in presuming version parity and silently failing if an update is needed on the new machine.)