# Using a Synology NAS with Cloud Sync/Dropbox in a Mac workflow



## boomboom88 (Oct 11, 2020)

Hi, wondering if anyone has had any experience using a Synology NAS pulling from Dropbox with Synology's Cloud Sync function.

I'm specifically curious about one aspect - characters in filenames and folder names that are allowed in Mac OS but not in the Synology (EXT4/BTRFS format) world. Does Synology just not see these? Or does it rename them in some way, and is that re-naming then passed back to the cloud / Dropbox?

Older versions of Logic would create a "/" as part of flattened comps in filenames which would present a problem for some of our older sessions.

I know this is a very specific question but if there's anyone that's had experience it'd be much appreciated.


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## colony nofi (Oct 12, 2020)

We have had problems with this. 
It depends HOW you connect to the Synology. We get garbled file names whenever there is a character that is not acceptable.
We have worked around it by keeping all file names to ONLY text, numbers and underscores / dashes. 
We had to go through our sound effects libraries (100000+ files) and made scripts to find characters that didn't work and replace them using another computer (a linux box)

We have also run sessions remotely from dropboxes which sync back to the synology box - and this has worked great (even did sound post for a series this way between london and sydney). Careful planning helps.

We didn't use cloud-sync. We just had one of our local machines use the synology nas as the file store for dropbox on that machine. Came with a bunch of cool upsides (lots of automation via alfred / IFTTT / Zapier / Automator etc)

Hope that helps.


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## colony nofi (Oct 12, 2020)

i can still find problems on the server in our old archive. Folders with a problem in the name look like this :






Only way around it was for us to run scripts - although we did fix most folders just by going thru manually.


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## boomboom88 (Oct 12, 2020)

Thanks so much for the response!

That was our thought - that we'll have to re-name any problematic files / folders manually.

With your screenshot, were those folders originally named something very different? Or did they show up only with certain characters replaced? 

You weren't using Cloud Sync, so you had a local machine connected to the NAS through SMB?

I've seen a list of unacceptable characters on Synology's site - were there more for you that caused problems than just the "/"?

Thanks again - we've been doing research on this for a while now and have had trouble determining what will work for us.


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## colony nofi (Oct 12, 2020)

I will try dig out the documentation our tech did - but there were def more characters than just “/“ which caused issues, for sure. 

And the characters of the messed up names have nothing to do with the original names. No clues what so ever. Fun right?

From what I recall though, it was a very simple script to run through the entire drive and change the file names. Now, that brings its own issues for opening sessions with missing files, but it’s the only way we were able to get it working for us.


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## boomboom88 (Oct 14, 2020)

Thanks, it does seem like this is the only way to do it from a bunch of folks I've spoken to as well. 

I was thinking of using Automator to find everything we'd need to rename, and possibly renaming as a separate task, or doing that manually. Then we'll probably see how involved it is to go through and repair our old sessions.


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## colony nofi (Oct 15, 2020)

So turns we just used an ubuntu box with the included rename utility. Took all of 15 mins to figure out and execute apparently


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## boomboom88 (Oct 16, 2020)

Nice, sounds good! Might be following up again once we get everything set up. Thanks.


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