I’ve been trying to backup all my files to iDrive since August >.o It’s about 500GB so I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised it’s taken forever, and apparently iDrive is slow, but just yesterday I was cleaning up some files and noticed there were some problematic files that haven’t been helping in the backup process. (over 210K of them in fact!) So I took some time and did 4 things to help get my backups rolling.

#1 Delete all .AppleDouble files

I was working on a Mac for a few years, and have some back-ups from them, and after going through the logs I notice a ton of “.AppleDouble” files. Apparently Macs make an AppleDouble of every.single.file. So…there were literally twice as many files to back up. I can just tell iDrive to ignore those files, and I did, but I also wanted to get rid of them all, since I’m no longer on a Mac. So I loaded up the shell from my QNAP, and ran this command:

rm -rf `find -type d -name .AppleDouble`

Which deletes all directories and their contents named “.AppleDouble” under the current directory.

Also, iDrive came up with a few of these odd errors:

#2 Delete all Icon\r files

IOERROR [/share/MD0_DATA/…/Icon], : No such file or directory

I also found about 20 of these odd Icon files, apparently their placeholders so Mac’s can change the icon of the folder. But their names are awkward so iDrive can’t handle them and I can’t delete them normally. They’re actually named “Icon\r” so I had to log into the shell again and run this command in order to delete them all:

rm $’Icon\r’

#3 Stop generating thumbnails

And last, but not least is my QNAP’s fault, by default file manager it generates .@__thumb folders with icons for every single image. Of which I have quite a few. Log in as admin, and you can disable the file generation this way:

That will stop new ones from being created, but not delete all the old ones, you can fire up the shell again and run this command to do that:

rm -rf `find -type d -name .@__thumb`

#4 Upgrade to the latest iDrive

I also noticed that the version of the iDrive app in QNAP’s App Center is out of date, so I grabbed a the latest version here: https://www.idrive.com/qnap-backup

The only problem is you have to download the right one for your NAS, but no matter where I looked I couldn’t find what mine is running. I ended up finding out by opening the iDrive in the App Center, I hovered over the download link, and voila!  It has the version right in the file name.  A little backwards to do it, but I couldn’t find the answer anywhere on the QNAP site.

References:

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/31867/what-is-icon-r-file-and-how-do-i-delete-them
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13032701/how-to-remove-folders-with-a-certain-name
http://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=80532&start=75