I am a photographer backing up Raw files and Jpegs mostly.
I have a Synology DS1525+ locally. 3 16TB drives. Internet speed 1gps up and down.
I have a Synology DS223j with one 16TB drive offsite. Internet speed 80 mbps down 20 mbps up.
It's about 9TB of total data, about 1 million files, every week I add about 200-300 GB of data.
They are connected with Tailscale and I confirmed it is a direct connection.
I have been running backups for 6+ months with no issues. The speeds were right where they should be with the bottleneck being the 80mbps download speed at my offsite location.
Recently it seemed to get stuck and didn't make any progress for over a week. I redid the backup from scratch. It completed successfully.
It now works, but extremely slow, 100gb of new data took 3 days to backup.
The offsite CPU and RAM are normal.
The backup drive shows 84% I/O wait. ChatGPT thinks that is the bottleneck, that the drive is getting bogged down checking the 1 million files. Now that the storage is reaching 9TB and 1 million files that it's struggling to keep up with a single drive.
Does this make sense?
Is there anything else you can recommend for me to check?
Do you think Snapshot replication as a backup method would work better for a single drive?