Synology Drive Client does not connect on Apple MacOS

Another odd issue I had recently was that my Synology Drive Connect on my Apple Macbook Air simply wouldn’t connect anymore. It just kept trying – no timeout, no “connection refused”, no error message at all. Meanwhile, Synology Drive Client on my Windows client worked fine. Both were up-to-date. At first I thought it might be a problem with the remote network I was connected to, but the issue persisted when I returned home. On my synology, the client was listed as “offline”.

Digging into this issue, it seems there was a problem with the logfiles. I am not exactly sure what the root cause was, but since the files are basically just text files, I assume they had grown too large and the client choked on them on startup.

Anyway, long story short. I stopped the drive client on my Macbook Air, then used the Terminal app to remove the log folder, located here:

/Users/{$username}/Library/Application Support/SynologyDrive/log

where, of course, {$username} was my login username on my Macbook Air. And lo and behold, upon restarting the client, it instantly connected. The client showed as “online” on my Synology DS, and files synced instantly.

I deleted the logs, but make sure to create a backup first if you think you might need them for anything.

Mac OS X: Time Machine Backup Slow / Stuck

I just noticed that my time machine backup (to a Synology NAS) was slow. As in… single-digit kilobytes per second, and then it got stuck completely. At first I thought this may be an issue with the Synology drive, but this turned out not to be true. In the log file of the Mac, I found a large number of these lines:

Sep 20 20:27:01 Ascalon.local mdworker[20883]: (Warning) Import: Bad path:

(Ascalon is the name of my Macbook Air.)

This seemed to be indicative of a filesystem error, but this was not the case.

It turned out that in my case the offending drive was an old Kindle I had connected to my Macbook to charge – it does mount as a USB drive, similar to a flash memory stick. Anyway, once unplugged the Time Machine backup ran as fast as always.

I should probably note that the Kindle itself is not defective – disk scans give it a clean bill of health. So I have to assume that something in its folder structure is not compatible with Time Machine. Unfortunately I never connected the Kindle to my Macbook Air before, so I can’t say if this is a general issue or a new bug of some sort.

Anyway, solution in this case: Unplug all USB drives one after the other, restart the Time Machine backup after each one to see which one offends, and then deal with that. You can use the disk check utility on your Mac, but please make sure you know what you are doing and do not accidentally erase it. (The Apple Knowledge Base is probably a good place to start.)