Important or Recent Updates
| Historic Updates | Date |
|---|---|
| First version of the setup | 01/08/2021 |
| Updated the general formatting Gave the guide a once over with LanguageTool | 14/03/2022 |
| Added ‘books’ | 15/07/2022 |
| DSM7.2 Update for Container Manager | 22/04/2023 |
| Adjusted screenshot for DSM7.2.1 | 30/04/2024 |
Please note – before starting make sure you have installed the Container Manager package from Package Center
When passing folders into a Docker container each mount point is treated as its own filesystem.
This means when moving files between two mount points Docker will do a Copy, then Delete operation. Meaning you are creating a full duplicate of a file while its being ‘moved’ creating unwanted disk IO and temporarily taking up double the space. (especially when seeding torrents after copying to the final folders)
In order to avoid this we need to set up a clean directory structure that allows us to just have one folder or share mounted to our containers.
If you are starting with these guides and have existing media you may need to move around your data in line with this setup, I recommend creating all the folders below using File station to avoid potential permission issues later.
Directory Structure
With this setup all of your media will sit within a single share, you can call this whatever you want but in all the guides it will be called ‘data’. If you change its name you will need to adjust any steps or compose files from my guides accordingly.
Please note: it is important that you make a decision around whether to use lowercase or Uppercase folder names, I recommend just stick with lowercase everywhere as it simplifies setup. If you decide to go against this ensure you change all the volume maps in the guides to match the case! Otherwise, containers and you will be very confused.
Open up the control panel then in ‘Shared Folder’ hit ‘Create’
On screen 1 fill out the name as ‘data’
Screen 2 we leave the folder unencrypted and don’t enable write once features
Screen 3 – Enable data checksums as this will help catch any issues with files during data scrubbing. (These options will not appear if you have ext4 file system – If you are starting this with a clean NAS go back change to BTRFS if possible)
Screen 4 – just click next past the summary
On the final screen we don’t need to change any user permissions yet, we will do that in the second guide.
The Sub-folders
Now we have our main ‘data’ directory we need to create a number of sub-folders to hold our media and downloaded files. You can amend this depending on whether you are using Torrents or Usenet (Newsgroups) or both.
You will initially create 3 folders within /data
- media
- torrents
- usenet
Then under /data/media create
- movies
- music
- tv
- books
Then under /data/torrents create
- completed
- incoming
- watch
Then under /data/usenet create
- completed
- intermediate
- nzb
- queue
Your folder tree should now look like this.
Finally, within the /docker shared folder create a folder called ‘projects‘ which will be used for any containers using the Projects (Docker Compose) feature of Container Manager.
You can now go back to where you left off in the guides and do the next step.
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Does it make sense to make a separate Audiobook folder (if I have a lot of them) in /data/media/ .
Or should i put the audiobooks in the books folder?
I would split them personally – I don’t have many but keep them separate from my books
noob following your guide and wanted to point out I was frantically reading and scrolling back through pages when I got to the image showing a ‘docker’ folder – as I didn’t have one! Please maybe highlight or asterisk the step about installing Container Manager first (I missed it when I first skimmed through the text) and maybe mention it should automatically create the ‘docker’ shared folder. Thank you.
Hey – Thanks for the suggestion, it’s quite timely as I am just reviewing/reworking the page about which package is for which DSM version and the Memory recommendations. Its likely I will do something like this so for someone new they follow step 0 once and then skip for all other guides..
Step 0: Container Manager Install and Performance Recommendations (SSD and Memory)
Step 1: Directories….
Hi,
I’m new to Synology and really like this setup. Since coming from Unraid, my initial plan was to use 2x SSDs for the downloads as a volume to increase unpacking and then move the files to the HDDs on a different volume. This is not possible with following this path, or is it?
On Unraid you can easily manage that, since a shared folder can span an array and a cache pool. Is there an equivalent here?
Hey Luke – I do something similar here using an old SSD on esata for the temp location for my Usenet downloads.
You would need to setup a separate volume for the NVME(SSD) pool, if they are not official sticks use this script to add them to the hard drive database and the UI will let you create the separate volume
https://github.com/007revad/Synology_HDD_db
After that you can just set up a shared folder on that volume for example /volume2/unpacks (name the shared folder however you wish)
Then add this as an extra mount point for the containers you want to use it
– /volume2/unpack:/unpack and set the folder in sabnzbd for example.
Hope that helps
Hi there. I’m only just beginning to follow your guides but so far (this one lol) it is straight forward and easy to understand. I have been trying to understand docker for about 3 years (on and off) and still find it frustrating. Mostly because guides i try to follow always become vague over certain steps and i just can’t figure out what to do in that step. HOPEFULLY it won’t be the case with your guides.
I just wanted to say THANK YOU for taking the time to produce these guides!
Hey, no worries – there is certainly a learning curve to this – take your time and don’t skip any reading of the steps and you should be good. Always check the FAQs if something doesn’t initially go as expected.. happy to help if you get stuck or jump on Discord as we have a ton of other helpful people at this point if I am not around!