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+# MinIO: It Works, But It Hates Me
+
+*By someone who survived a 150,000-file sync and lived to tell the tale.*
+
+---
+
+MinIO is fast. It's lightweight. It's compatible with Amazon S3. It’s everything you want in a self-hosted object storage system.
+
+Until you try to **use it like a filesystem**.
+
+Then it becomes the most temperamental, moody, selectively mute piece of software you've ever met.
+
+---
+
+## What I Was Trying to Do
+
+All I wanted was to migrate ~40GB of Mastodon media from local disk into a MinIO bucket. Nothing fancy. Just a clean `rclone sync` and a pat on the back.
+
+---
+
+## What Actually Happened
+
+- **Load average spiked to 33**
+- `find` froze
+- `rclone size` hung
+- `zfs snapshot` stalled so long I thought the server died
+- The MinIO **UI lied to my face** about how much data was present (5GB when `rclone` said 22GB)
+- Directory paths that looked like files. Files that were secretly directories. I saw `.meta` and `.part.1` in my dreams.
+
+---
+
+## The Root Problem
+
+MinIO is **not** a filesystem.
+
+It's a flat key-value object store that's just *pretending* to be a folder tree. And when you throw 150,000+ nested objects at it — especially from a tool like `rclone` — all the lies unravel.
+
+It keeps going, but only if:
+- You feed it one file at a time
+- You don’t ask it questions (`rclone ls`, `rclone size`, `find`, etc.)
+- You don’t use the UI expecting it to reflect reality
+
+---
+
+## The Fixes That Kept Me Sane
+
+- Switched from `rclone ls` to `rclone size` with `--json` (when it worked)
+- Cleaned up thousands of broken `.meta`/`.part.*` directories using a targeted script
+- Paused `rclone` mid-sync with `kill -STOP` to get snapshots to complete
+- Used `du -sh` instead of `find` to track usage
+- Lowered `rclone` concurrency with `--transfers=4 --checkers=4`
+- Drank water. A lot of it.
+
+---
+
+## The Moral of the Story
+
+If you're going to use MinIO for massive sync jobs, treat it like:
+
+- A **delicate black box** with fast internals but fragile mood
+- Something that **prefers to be written to, not inspected**
+- An S3 clone with boundary issues
+
+---
+
+## Final Thought
+
+MinIO *does* work. It's powerful. It’s fast. But it also absolutely hates being watched while it works.
+
+And you won't realize how much until you're 100,000 files deep, snapshot frozen, and `rclone` is telling you you're doing great — while the UI smirks and says you're at 5 gigs.
+
+MinIO: It works.  
+But it hates you.
+
+---
+
+**Filed under:** `disaster recovery`, `object storage`, `sync trauma`, `zfs`, `rclone`, `why me`