I have a Synology DS916+ NAS and, for the 9 months or so, I’ve been using it to back up my photos to Microsoft Azure. I’ve realised that they are being backed up in a format that’s unique to Synology’s Hyper Backup program, so I should probably see if there is an alternative that backs up the files in their native format but, more worryingly, this afternoon I noticed that backups had been failing for a few days. The logs weren’t much help (no detailed information) and a search on the ‘net didn’t turn much up either. For reference, this was the (very high level) information in the logs when viewed in the Hyper Backup GUI:
Information 2017/07/08 03:00:02 SYSTEM [Azure Blob] [Backup Photos to Microsoft Azure] Backup task started.
Error 2017/07/08 03:00:33 SYSTEM [Azure Blob] [Backup Photos to Microsoft Azure] Exception occured while backing up data.
Error 2017/07/08 03:00:36 SYSTEM [Azure Blob] [Backup Photos to Microsoft Azure] Failed to backup data.
Error 2017/07/08 03:00:36 SYSTEM [Azure Blob] [Backup Photos to Microsoft Azure] Failed to run backup task.
(Since then, I’ve found how to view detailed backup logs on a Synology NAS, thanks to a blog post by Jonathan Mumm, though in this case, the logs didn’t shine much of a light on the problem for me.)
I wondered if there were any DSM updates available that might fix things but, when I checked for updates, I got a message to say “Insufficient capacity for update. The system partition requires at least 400MB”. Googling suggested lots of manual file deletion and I was sure this was just a buildup of temp files (maybe to do with the failed backup), so I decided to reboot. After all, what do you do when a computer isn’t working as expected? Turn it off and on again!
After rebooting, attempts to update no longer produced an error (simply confirming that I’m up-to-date with DSM 6.1.2-15132) and the backup is now running nicely (it will take a few hours to complete as I added a few months’ worth of iPhone photos to the NAS earlier in the week, around about the time the backups started failing…)