Request for help re: scheduling tasks

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1

A newbie here looking for some help/advice re: scheduling tasks on the NAS.

Background: Home NAS, very little I/O, used mostly for storage. TS-464-8G with (4) 4TB drives in RAID 5. Single Ethernet port. QTS 5.2.9.3451.Connecting to it from a MacBook Pro running Mac OS 26.5.1.

I’m revising all of the scheduled tasks on the NAS to ensure they don’t run concurrently or unnecessarily. There are a lot of them. Log data from the last 18 months shows me how long the jobs typically take. I’ve grouped the jobs into daily or not-daily categories.

The daily jobs start at 0000 and end by 0800. They are: SMART Rapid tests (only on Sunday), Snapshots, Malware scan, Security scan (Friday only), HBS3 sync to the old remote NAS, HBS3 sync to Backblaze B2, updates of NAS files from the MacBook Pro, updates of files from a Mac mini.

The not-daily jobs are raid scrubbing, antivirus scanning (rapid & complete), and file system checks.

Questions

  1. I haven’t done RAID scrubbing yet so I don’t know how long it takes but I believe it takes a while. If I start the job at 0800 (after the daily jobs), and scrubbing takes longer than 16 hours, then it will still be running when the daily jobs start. Is there any way to avoid this? Note that I see some posts showing the option to set Exclude times for RAID scrubbing but I do NOT see that option when I go to set up the job. Maybe that isn’t part of my version of QTS? And, is it detrimental if the other jobs run while RAID scrubbing is in progress?

  2. The Antivirus scan allows one to specify a scan frequency of some integer number of minutes, hours, or days without specifying a start time. What time to jobs specified in this way start? Note that I may not run AV scans at all - a complete scan takes 5 days(!) and a quick scan of only part of the NAS takes 15 hours. Since all files on the NAS come from the Macs that also have antivirus protection, I may not need the NAS AV scans. Thoughts?

  3. File system checks - it looks like I can only do this manually or by scheduling a one-time check. Is that true? And what good is a scheduled one-time check? If manually is my only realistic option, what would prompt me to do the check - an abnormal shutdown of the NAS?

  4. Scheduling question - I started off trying to set up a rolling 4 week schedule for a lot of the jobs on the NAS such that, for example, a given job ran every 4 weeks on Monday. I found that most items can be scheduled either daily (select time), weekly (select day of week & time), monthly (select date & time). This is fine but a consequence is that the monthly dates will be on various days of the week - the 8th of a month might be on Tuesday one month and Thursday in a different month. Is there any way to set up some kind of schedule that is every other week or every 4th week or similar?

  5. This might be a new feature request but right now is just an idea - there are so many tasks that can be scheduled on this NAS, including some I only learned about by reviewing the logs. A dedicated scheduling app that has shows all scheduled items on a calendar-like display and that allows one to set and changes schedules from there could be useful. But, maybe it isn’t worth the effort if folks just set schedules and never fiddle with them again. Thoughts?

Thanks for feedback, both on my questions and on scheduling items in general. I hope to learn a lot.

2

You can optimize your load by getting rid of virus and security scans, they do nothing useful.(never ever ever ever expose your NAS to WAN and you are good) The Antivirus does not protect your NAS itself and malware remover has a horrible track record as well (it’s not called malware preventer for a reason)

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I’m not entirely sure why @dolbyman doesn’t like the anti-virus scans. It has found viruses in old files I’ve moved in from elsewhere. But it is slow (see below)…

So answering some of your questions:

1.) RAID Scrubbing - you can set up a schedule so that it runs overnight only. I do my RAID scrubbing once a month but only between like midnight and 7 AM. It slows things down so backups do run slower if they are running overnight but I don’t really care. What I care about is it being sluggish when I am trying to use it. I have 36TB in each NAS and it takes about 14 days to scrub it on my TS-873A. I think my TVS-672XT goes faster but I have an i7 which is quite zippy.

2.) The AV scan on the NAS does take a long time. I used to scan only specific folders on a weekly basis but I disabled it as it was still taking a long time and a lot of resources. Once you know your files on the NAS are clean and that everything you put on it is clean, then you should be fine.

3.) Not sure what you mean by file system checks. Please explain.

4.) What kind of jobs are you trying to schedule? Backups? They have pretty good scheduling options.

I do snapshots daily and snapshot vaults daily. I just have them randomly scattered thought the night. Once the first snapshot is done, the subsequent ones are quite quick. Your backups are what will take the longest, but even those are not bad if it is incremental. Just set them all to run overnight, have notifications set up to email you when they complete or if there are issues and forget about it.

I don’t see a lot of value in security center scans. The problem with Malware is if someone gets into your NAS and puts malware on it, it’s likely already too late. They will encrypt all your files and you will be SOL unless you have a backup stored offline.

4

@NA9D He has QTS, not Hero. QTS doesn’t have Scrubbing schedule blackout times. You schedule it, it runs, no matteer how long it takes.

5

Because people have always misunderstood the clamav for something that protects the NAS and it’s also not realtime but scheduled only.

If you have the clients scan files, it should be enough

6

That is a good point. I never thought of it that way…

7

I’m not sure what the security scan does other than tell me I have some app updates, or a firmware update, available for installation. Interesting re: the malware remover. So it tries to remove malware from the system volume after it is infected. If so, and if it works, it seems that it should run frequently. For me, though, since there is very little I/O on the NAS, it seems that the risk of infection is not high. Fortunately, the malware remover scan takes only about 2 minutes to complete on my NAS so the overhead isn’t great.

8

If QTS doesn’t have blackout times, then, yes, I guess I just have to set it and let it run. IF I figure out how to set schedules up correctly, perhaps I can have the daily scheduled items not run when RAID scrubbing is happening. I don’t know yet if I can do that with the scheduling options I have (hence my thought for some kind of rolling 4 week schedule or similar.)

9

People that got infected by malware had the only way to ever get their data back (yes, no backups) removed by malware remover (ransome payment page)

With a NAS not exposed to the web, the risk of malware infection is basically zero, why use an app that has in the past removed vital system files, that prevented systems from booting (yes that also happened years ago)

So an app I find silly (does not protect, just reacts when it’s too late)

10

Thank you for your thoughts. I appreciate it.

File system checks: I go to Storage & Snapshots > Overview > Global Settings > Storage and the last item is “Scheduled File System Check”. I can also go to Storage & Snapshots > Storage > Storage/Snapshots, select a volume, click on Manage, and manually kick off a file system check.

My understanding is that file system checks are to be done after things like uncontrolled shutdowns, say following a power failure if the UPS fails before the NAS shuts down, or for some other reason. I don’t think they are meant to be done frequently - I was thinking of quarterly but, since the volume being checked is inaccessible during the check, I wanted to be careful about scheduling it.

My son-in-law has his NAS set to NOT automatically turn on following a power failure. He manually starts it up and runs the file system checks at that time if he thinks it prudent. Maybe I have to do the same.

11

I don’t think you need to worry about file system checks unless something untoward happens like a power failure.

12

That is too bad then. I didn’t realize that. Should be a feature request as RAID maintenance takes a lot of resources.

13

Hi @WinterZone,

1. RAID scrubbing & blackout times. Franklin is correct: scrubbing blackout/exclude windows are a QuTS hero (ZFS) feature, not QTS — so it’s not your version, it’s the platform. On QTS, once scrubbing starts it runs to completion. Running other jobs concurrently is not harmful to your data; scrubbing and backups will simply compete for I/O and slow each other down, which on a single-NIC home unit you’ll feel as sluggishness rather than any risk. On a 4×4TB RAID 5 your scrub will likely finish in single-digit to low-double-digit hours (much faster than the very large arrays mentioned above), so an overnight start should usually clear before your morning jobs — but there’s no hard guarantee, and no way in QTS to force it to yield.

2. Antivirus (ClamAV) — start time & whether to run it. For “every N hours/days” schedules with no start time, the interval is counted from when you save/enable the task, then repeats on that cycle. On whether you need it: it’s worth clearing up what ClamAV actually does. It’s an open-source scanner whose job is not to protect the NAS’s own OS — it scans the files stored on the NAS for malware that could infect the Windows/Mac clients those files travel to. So if your endpoints already scan their own files, the NAS-side scan is largely redundant for your use case, and given the scan times you’re seeing, skipping it is a reasonable call.

3. File system checks. Your understanding is right. A file system check is event-driven, not routine maintenance — run it after an uncontrolled shutdown, suspected mount issue, or if you see I/O errors, not on a fixed quarterly cadence. Since the volume goes offline during the check, scheduling it “just in case” adds risk without benefit. A good UPS plus clean shutdowns is the real preventative here; the manual check is your recovery tool when something untoward happens.

4. Every-other-week / 4-week schedules. QTS’s built-in schedulers offer daily / weekly / monthly only — there’s no native “every N weeks” option, so the day-of-week drift you noticed on monthly schedules is expected. The usual workaround is to pin recurring jobs to a fixed weekday (weekly) and stagger start times so they don’t overlap, accepting that true 4-week cadence isn’t available out of the box today.

One note on the security tools, since they came up: ClamAV (as above) protects your clients, not the NAS itself. Malware Remover is a different tool — it targets active intrusion attempts, including emergency response to 0-day campaigns and detection/removal of known N-day attack patterns specific to QNAP. Neither is real-time endpoint protection, and neither replaces the fundamentals: keep the NAS off the open WAN, keep an offline/immutable backup copy, and use snapshots. Those are what actually save you.

5. A unified scheduling app. This is a genuinely good idea, and you’ve identified a real pain point — schedules are spread across Storage & Snapshots, HBS 3, Security Center, Antivirus, and more, to the point where you found jobs you didn’t know existed by reading logs. A single calendar-style view to see and manage everything in one place would be valuable, and “set it and forget it” users would still benefit from being able to see what’s running. Thank you for laying it out so clearly — I’ll pass this along as product feedback. Input like this, with the reasoning behind it, is exactly what helps these ideas get prioritized.

Thanks again for such a well-structured post — this thread will be a useful reference for others planning their own schedules.

14

Speaking of Raid Scrubbing. It would be useful to exclude raid groups from scrubbing. Most of my NAS’s have pool 1 raid 1 on ssd’s. This is the working area. Volume 2 is raid5 backup area on spinning disks. This is the only raid group I want to scrub. Vol3 is camera storage Raid5. I never want to scrub this and it is largest volume on the NAS and takes over 24 hours. Cameras overwrite it every 14 days so why make it run monthly with Vol2?

15

Other responses have done a really excellent job of covering the basics… but just in case anyone else finds there way to this thread, a couple of quick additional points to consider.

First… with regards to scheduling backups, one of the things not yet available in QTS (can’t speak to QuTS Hero, sorry) is the concept of generational backups. However, there is a way you can achieve this, if you have the patience.

I have a pair of QNAP NAS - a TVS-672XT and an older TS-670. The 670 is configured via power management to remain switched off most of the day - it powers on at about 03:30 each morning and then switches off about 05:30 after all my backups run.

To create multi-generational backups, I then have 31 discrete HBS3 “Sync” jobs that copy a folder “/Public/Data” from the TVS-672 to /Public/Backup/xx/Data" on the TS-670, but where “xx” on the 670 is replaced by the generational digits 01-31 inclusive - for “day of month”. I then have a total of 31 versions of this generic “Data” backup, imaginatively named “Data01”, “Data02”, “Data03”, etc.

(I have put in an enhancement request for proper multi-generational backup - the proposal was accepted by QNAP’s developers and I understand it is being worked on).

This is a simple [if a bit laborious] way that you can create multi-generational backups on your QNAP. In my example, here, I am copying from QNAP to QNAP and using QSync - but you don’t have to write to another QNAP and you can use a number of different mechanisms to copy your data, depending on what your destination device supports.

Second… if you requirement is to perform generic activities… and if you’re comfortable working on the command line, then you can also work directly with QNAP’s cron scheduler. I totally understand that this is “inner workings” territory and I would strongly discourage you from considering this unless you are very comfortable working with the low level basics of a Linux operating system, but QNAP do actually post instructions to tell you how to work with crontab on your NAS.

QNAP provide some “official documentation”, which you can find here:-

I’m going to stress once more - don’t consider looking at this unless you’re completely comfortable working on a LInux command line. QNAP use crontab for much of their host automation, so in the event that you did make an error, the blast radius might be wider than just your job not working. But… for people with the experience and comfortable that they know what they are doing, this is something that QNAP have officially documented.

Appreciate that the above might go a bit beyond the scope of your original question, but hopefully this may prove useful to someone who finds their way here.