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
-
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?
-
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?
-
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?
-
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?
-
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.