I like this program

Posts: 9 · rayge 2 Sep 2025, 00:28

I've have a Synology 216j nas with about 2tb of music files and use an external USB drive to update them. I've tried Synology's packages, but USB copy is only one way and Drive never stops indexing the NAS.

FreeFileSync was intimidating at first to make sure I wasn't deleting files forever, but once I learned more it just works. No hitches so far.

I think more how-to videos would be helpful. I use 2-way sync and get alerts there is no recycle bin, but then I see the files in the recycle bins on both the Synology nas and the external USB drive.

There are so many feature I'm still discovering. For example, it took me quite a while to find out to click on the bottom icon with the big = sign to show all the files discovered in the latest 2-way sync.

edit: I was pleasantly surprised to find out I could delete apple hidden files starting with "._" .
When apple music files are saved on the Synology the duplicate files starting with "._" don't show up on the NAS, but when copied to a Windows external drive, Windows explorer displays all those hidden duplicate files. When I 'compare' my windows ext drive with FreeFileSync, those files show up on the ext drive so I can delete them.

Posts: 2978 · Plerry 2 Sep 2025, 06:45

A Synology NAS recycle bin is a fully NAS specific recycle-bin.
FFS is fully unaware of this NAS recycle bin capability, so it reports it as unavailable.
But, while FFS is unaware of this, your NAS still moves files that are "deleted" to the recycle bin for those shares for which you activated the recycle bin on your NAS.

Posts: 9 · rayge 2 Sep 2025, 12:02

A Synology NAS recycle bin is a fully NAS specific recycle-bin.
FFS is fully unaware of this NAS recycle bin capability, so it reports it as unavailable.
But, while FFS is unaware of this, your NAS still moves files that are "deleted" to the recycle bin for those shares for which you activated the recycle bin on your NAS. Plerry, 02 Sep 2025, 06:45

Thanks for the explanation. I deleted all those files and also the log files and db files that appeared in the recycle bin. The synology NAS recycle bin was re-created on the external drive with the 2-way sync and I deleted those as well.
There is one main db file in the parent main folder on both NAS and external drive that I left.