A tip for migrating from Google Photos to Synology

After exporting my photos for migration to Synology, Google gave me 95 2GB zip files to download. I tried downloading directly into my mapped network drive, but the speed was super slow. My tip for you is if you are familiar with docker, you can spin up a Firefox container and map your desired network drive to the container. If you download from the Docker container, it will use the NAS’s wired internet connection rather than your PC’s WiFi connection. It is a much faster process, cutting it from days to hours for me. I’m sure most of you would have thought of this right away, but after 25 manual downloads, this was a huge relief for me.

chilicheeselies,

A little off topic, but whats the estimates starting cost to using Synology? Ive been looking for a good syncing solution for media between my partner and I. Any good resources anyone has to share for getting started?

Harvest6671,

It’s not a cheap hobby, but self hosting is fun. Learning more about Docker has made it a great way to learn self hosting. I guess Synology is like training wheels in the self hosting community, but when you only know Windows, it’s a good introduction to Linux, servers, networking, RAID, and a ton of other topics.

The units aren’t expensive when you compare it to the storage drives. I use a DS918+ which has 4 bays, and I have 14TB drives in each one. This is much more space than I need, but you always end up with more than you expect. I’d say each drive is probably $250 each right now.

chilicheeselies,

I’m a software engineer working with cloud hosting by profession, so I really dont mind training wheels for my home needs. In fact it is preferred because I want to spend the smallest amount of time possible just solving my problem (easily sharing photos between ios and Android without relying icloud or google). I do enough hard stuff at work haha.

14TB is perfect. I could probably get away with a four bay setup with a RAID config for redundancy.

atzanteol,

This makes no sense to me. Why would a docker bind mount use your ethernet but using the mount directly uses wifi? And why not just turn off WiFi and force the ethernet connection to be used?

dvoraqs,

The WiFi must be on his machine that he was using to manually download the files, but he later delegated that task to a docker image, sharing the wired connection of the Synology host machine.

dinckelman, (edited )

I have a Syncthing container copying my entire DCIM folder on the phone. It’s jank, but it works fast, and I have copies of stuff on my other devices by extension

MrQuallzin,

There’s an option to change the download size. 2GB is the smallest, 50GB I believe is the biggest. Downloaded my Google Photos to import into Immich yesterday, I opted for 10GB files and had 17 zip files to download.

Harvest6671, (edited )

Yeah I did 2GB files because I expected to download through the browser and didn’t want anything to time out and fail in the middle. I never expected how slow it would be though. Moving to the docker container made things a lot faster. It went from 5mbps to 50mbps.

webuge,

It is a bit off topic but when I tried to generate the files from Google takeout it failed do you have any suggestions? Also this idea of downloading directly in the NAS is very good

rentar42,

"failed" is a pretty bad problem description. Did you get any error messages or unexpected blank pages, where the zip files empty? ... without any context no one can help you (I'm not saying I can help you with that context, but someone might be able to).

webuge,

Yes I know. The problem is Google does not provide any more information just said it failed. This is a screenshot from the email https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/b4bb68f4-6889-408f-ae31-51482d8a56c3.png

I tried again and failed, I think I will need to migrate it manually :(

webuge,

I used the default split size of 2GB and now worked. I was trying to use 50GB but I think Google didn’t liked it so much

elbarto777, (edited )

That’s a biiig difference! Did you buy your wifi router within the last two years?

Harvest6671, (edited )

No, it’s older than that I think, but I’m not directly connected due to where my PC is in the house. This worked out perfectly for me, though. The firefox container jumped the speed from about 5mbps to 50mbps

elbarto777,

Nice!

SheeEttin,

Yes, doing it directly instead of downloading then uploading is generally faster. As is wired instead of wireless.

Harvest6671,

As I mentioned, it is probably something that most of the people here would think of right away, but for those like me who don’t have a wired connection to their router due to whatever reason, this can speed things up. This post was intended to help people like me looking for a faster way to degoogle.

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