The find command on an old Asustor

Instead of clicking randomly through endless hierarchies of folders on the web GUI of Asustor, you can just ssh into the device and search on the command line using find. However, there are important differences between the find command on contemporary Linux systems and the find command of ADM (the OS of Asustor NAS servers). My EOL Asustor (AS-304T) uses 3.5.9.RWM1, which uses the BusyBox find v1.19.3, while my Ubuntu Linux uses GNU find 4.9.0. BusyBox find trades features for a small binary footprint and is locked to GPL-2. On the GPL-3 side on Linux, significant new features and performance enhancements have been added. Here is the find command that you need if you want to search all disks on your Asustor:

find / -name 'IMG_1932.JPG'

If you are in the root directory, you can omit the path (/). By default, the starting point for the search is the current directory.

find -name 'IMG_1932.JPG'

And if there are no special characters in your filename, you can omit the single or double quote characters around your filename. But I always use them because it is easy to forget them if you need them.

find . -name IMG_1932.JPG

However, you might not want to start your search at the root level, because Asustor will give you multiple hits for the same file, which makes things more confusing than is necessary. The Asustor OS mounts the same device under different mount points, and therefore, you see the same files multiple times in your search results. To avoid this, you should rather search the /volume1, which searches everything for most practical use cases. If you find duplicate entries, you can determine whether they are the same file using the command below. If the Inode numbers are the same, it is one-and-the-same file!

stat "/share/User Homes/mjeltsch/Seminar_May18_2024.pdf"
stat "/volume1/home/mjeltsch/Seminar_May18_2024.pdf"

When searching everything on all filesystems, many errors occur because you are not allowed to search certain system directories unless you are root. Using sudo might therefore be a good idea!