Hallo,
I’m trying to rate limit my offsite backups to preserve bandwidth when I need it.
The setting doesn’t allow me to go over midnight: i.e. if I set start time at 7am and end time at 1am (of the following day) I get an error “start time must be before end time”.
It makes sense but this way rate limits must end not later than 23.59, killing my broadband connection after that (streaming services start to hiccups).
Am I doing it wrong or is it a flaw in how the rate limit is designed?
Thanks
So you can rate limit your backup but it will be rate limited always. I’m not entirely sure when you want to rate limit things. I would set your backups to occur after midnight and let them run as fast as they can (unless you are needing bandwidth for other things in the middle of the night)…
Once you make the first backup, subsequent backups only update changed files. So the actual bandwidth use is pretty minimal. I do an online backup every night to QNAPs MyQnapCloud storage space and it generally takes about 20 minutes. Most of that time is the NAS looking for changed files. You may have a bigger backup set, but still it should not be that large.
What kind of up/down speeds do you have? Uploads should not really affect your download speed for streaming unless it’s swamping it so badly that you can’t get ack packets back to the streaming provider. It should be something you can manage on your router as well.
Sorry for my late reply.
I need to rate limit during the day and let it run at full speed at night.
Since I often end watching TV after midnight I have issues with streaming services when the backup starts eating up all bandwidth at midnight.
This problem of course applies only for the first backup (which will take almost 10 days with my VDSL) but could seldomly happen if there will be lots of modifications on the NAS content.
Unfortunately I just have 20 Mbit/s of upload speed and when HBS is not rate limited it makes the internet connection unusable even from smartphones and computers.
Ideally I would let it run unlimited from 1am to 7am, but it seems that HBS logic doesn’t allow this.
Also the limit setting unit is MBps only and doesn’t allows decimal values, so I can only use half of my bandwidth (1MBps) or full bandwidth (2MBps).
Ah. I see. I’m still somewhat surprised though that even at 20Mbps that you have problems. Until earlier this year, my connection was about 25Mbps and I don’t think I ever had issues. But anyhow…
I am not sure what kind of router you have or your technical ability in that area, but if you have a sophisticated enough router, you could set up rules in the router to rate limit the QNAP or apply QoS rules. That would help all the services competing for bandwidth to work better together.
As for the limit setting, this is one reason why I hate the fact that in QNAP world, everything is in Bytes not Bits. Grrr…
I’ve passed on the issue you mentioned about the setting not working across multiple days to our internal team. We’ll implement an improvement in a future version. Thanks!
That would be nice, at least you could add an option to invert the logic (not limited hours vs limited hours).
Yes, I have a Fritz where I have set lower priority to NAS.
But having a more flexible way to set rate limits in terms of time and units (Mbit/s instead of MBps) would be a nice feature.