COMPLETE BEGINNER’S GUIDE for Synology NAS - 2023 DSM 7.2

all right how's it going y'all so today we're going to be going over how to set up a Synology NASA for a complete beginner this is really going to be Geared for people who have never set up an ass before and really going to be going over all the most basic things and it's going to be in a Synology DSM 7.2 so DSM is the operating system that the Synology runs so Synology is a NASA it's actually a server in here so it's its own computer and so it has its own operating system and that is DSM or disk station manager and DSM 7.2 is the most recent version that has just come out so that is what you will be installing and so this guide is really geared towards people who this is the first time they've set up a Nas and it's going to be the most basic stuff there are going to be a few really important things we do need to set up specifically btrfest snapshots that are going to be very crucial to have and you will just be able to forget about them until you need them and then they're there to save you and so I'm really going to focus on adding features here that are really crucial rather than just stuff that's going to add unnecessary complexity so the few things we are going to be adding in additionally than just the basic Nas are going to be things that are super crucial to making sure your NASA is safe and that if anything happens you have a very easy way to undo it and so that's really going to be the focus of this I'm also going to bring up a couple of extra things as we go through the video that can really help you kind of secure your Nas additionally and some additional features but the real focus of this is the basics start it up for somebody who's just starting out all right so before we get started I actually do Synology and other business I.T Consulting professionally and so if you are looking for somebody to remotely set all this stuff up for you and get it all working go ahead and check out the link down description the hire me link you can absolutely hire me for any project no matter how small or how large all right back to the actual tutorial and we're going to talk about first the nas so this is going to more or less assume that you've already purchased the Synology to ask if you have not already right now I would really recommend a four bay Nas as the starter if you think you're going to need a lot space and I generally like buying only two drives to start out and that way you can expand out as you need to and we're going to be setting up what's called a raid system or a redundant system it is not a backup but it is protection against Hardware failure and so whenever you're thinking about how much space you have simply subtract one of the disks you have and use that for redundancy and so then any one of your disks can fail and you will not lose any data Note you still need to back up your important data but it is a nice to have that keeps you running and so even if one hard drive fails you can keep going alright so this right here is the ds923 plus and the way you install your hard drives is up front right here there are two different types normally it's either push in and pull out or in this one is just a pull out so you just pull out these plastic trays and you put in your drives like this they're kind of difficult to figure out at first but there are two plastic covers on either side that go into the hard drive screw holes so that way you don't need any tools to install these to do it all you need to do is pop them off by pulling off the side on both ends foreign your hard drive with the metal teeth next to the black plastic at the end and it only goes in one way then there are four grommets two on either side that are rubber and if you look in them you should see the screw hole you're going to then clip back in your sides right here and you're good to go the hard drive will only go in in One Direction so if it Clips in and it's secure you know it is in there it should be flat against the back side right here and then the teeth should be right next to it so it's not too bad to set up but especially the very first time some of these are kind of hard to pop off so it can be a little bit difficult so once you've done that all you need to do a slot in and lock it back in place most also come with a key that you can turn to lock it additionally so that way if you have a kid who's running around or even just employees who mess with stuff you can lock them and that way it makes sure that people have to actually think about unlocking it rather than just clicking and pulling out so if somebody just goes in and wants to mess with it they're not going to accidentally pull out a drive while the thing's running and it's actually just a simple Allen key if you ever lose it so you don't need to worry about that then on the back is the very important thing and that is the network port so a Nas stands for network attached storage the keyword being their network if you're used to like external drives like this you're used to just plugging them directly into your computer that's because this is called a Das or direct attached storage with a Nas it is network attached and so you actually talk to this completely over ethernet so that can either be over wired ethernet or Wi-Fi there are going to be at least one or up to four Network ports on the back of your Nas all you need to do is plug one of those into a switch or this can also be into your Wi-Fi router ideally to get the best performance when you're transferring files from your computer to the nas it's really nice to also have your computer hooked up to wired ethernet because that will give you the best possible speeds but it will absolutely still work over Wi-Fi especially if you're just transferring photos and things like that it's a good place to start but if you feel like it's a little slow wired ethernet will make a massive difference and so all you're going to need to do is plug one of these ethernet cables into the backy router only do one of them to start until you've learned more and then go ahead and plug in the power and then all you gotta do is press the power button up front and we're gonna go ahead and get started so I'm going to do that really quick right here and then we're going to get on our computer to set up an astronaut the Nas is completely controlled over the Internet over a web browser so it's very easy to go ahead and do all right so I'm going to go ahead and do this and we're going to go over the next steps I'm just going to plug in the ethernet cable power and then turn it on so I've just plugged an s in hit the power button and now the light is blinking blue and I can see here the hard drive starting to spin up it's going to beep once once the nas has booted and then we'll know so we're just going to go ahead and wait until we hear the beep and then we know the Nas is booted and ready to start talking to us that was the perfect timing and so now we're going to go on our computer right here and we are going to open up our web browser and go to find.synology.com and this is automatically going to find the nas on our Network since I run a lot of NASA's I'm going to see a lot of things here but you probably will only see the one so I'm just going to go directly to it and you should see it right here the status likely will be not installed and so we're just going to go ahead and connect her on in and go through our first time setup stuff and so now we're just going to go ahead and install DSM on here so you will not get this page I'm just running the most recent version which is the release candidate which means I'm filming this video early so it's having me do this manually but you will not get this page instead you will just get an installed page and it will automatically run through I'm going to wait till the full version is out before posting this video to make sure that is true but don't worry about this you will just see a install now button but I'm just going to manually upload the file because I'm doing this early you will then get told hey all data will be deleted one thing to know this is a Nas so it's got to install its own operating system on there so if there's anything on the hard drives that you want to keep stop right now unplug them and go ahead and make sure you've got that all copied over because installing DSM on here will format the drives and so you will lose all data that is currently stored on there so remember that but if a new drives just hit okay and now it's just going to go ahead and say installing disk station manager this process can take about maybe 10 minutes at the most normally and so we'll just go ahead and come back once this is done it's non-linear as you can see it jumped from eight to forty percent in about half a second there so it's not completely linear so you just give it a few minutes complete and you will know it's done when you hear the next beep because that means it has Rebooted so I'm just gonna go fast forward through this and we will get back when it's done and there was our first beep and so now it should be very much close to being done we are now just going to have to wait for the packages to install and then it's just going to pop up here so overall I was answering emails while this is going it runs very easily and you don't have to touch anything it's great all the setup stuff just starts at the very beginning and you enter everything in and then next we're just going to have to set up our volumes and things like that all right and so now it has gone ahead and fully installed and now it says welcome to DSM 7.2 let's go ahead hit start so first off we're going to go ahead and add a device name this is essentially how it's going to show up on the network so when you see it in Mac osfinder or Windows File Explorer this is the name it's going to be so I'm just going to call it ds923 keep it easy and now you're going to enter an administrator account so this is going to be one of the places that I had mentioned earlier where you can do some things for extra security if you're just a basic home user you don't need to worry about this but if you are running business I would really recommend having two accounts for yourself especially if you're going to have kind of more users and being have a little bit more complex setups you're going to want to have an administrator account for yourself and a regular account for yourself so for basic home users don't worry about this just type in your name here and you're going to be the admin because you probably only have one account maybe two accounts total but for businesses you can do something like will admin and then you're also going to create yourself a regular user account and so that way you get more security because you only ever sign into DSM as an admin when you need to do admin things whereas if you're logging in for just accessing files you will just use your regular user account to keep this very simple because this is very much a beginner guide we're just going to stick with Will so that's my name here and then a password note there are options we can do here that can make this accessible on the internet so make sure that this is not a basic password like password or anything that's easily guessable you want to do at least probably eight characters with multi case and all that good stuff because you do not want this to be just a simple password especially if you choose later on to open this up to the Internet and I'm going to allow this to be displayed in webassistant so that way we can use it more easily to find it later on I'll save the password now you have an option to say when you want to update your Das for the vast majority of users the default of automatically install important DSM packages is exactly what I would recommend this means if there's ever a massive security vulnerability found in DSM it will automatically update that patch because that is something you want to update immediately whereas if it's just a little bug fix or something like that it will not automatically update instead it will wait for you to update and so that way you don't update unless you need to and you can have a little bit more control of it I highly recommend this for everybody now I would highly recommend signing in with a Synology account you can create an account here or you can just sign if you've already got one or if you want the maximum privacy you can also just skip this and host it only locally but you do lose out on some benefits the biggest reason why I recommend everybody sign in with a Synology account is because of active Insight automatically having emails for something like a hard drive dying so that way you can always get notified if your Nas is having an issue so I'm just going to sign in now or you can just create an account there and now you have the option to set up what's called Quick Connect Quick Connect is great but it also does have a security implication what Quick Connect does is it allows you to access your Nas wherever you are in the world right now you will only be able to access the nas within your homes Network or your office's Network if you add Quick Connect you can access it from wherever in the world there is a security implication of this because now anybody can access your NAS from wherever in the world I'm not saying they can get into the nas but they would be able to see it so you leave yourself vulnerable in two possible ways both of them highly unlikely but you should be aware of it the first is if somebody starts password guessing so as long as you have a strong password we're going to set up autoblock on here so they'll automatically get blocked but you don't want to open up your NASA internet if your password is password because then somebody may just guess that and get in the second which is something you do not have as much control over is what if one day Synology had a vulnerability in it that allowed anybody access it I think that's highly unlikely so it's something for you to be aware of it's really unlikely I personally use Quick Connect and it's great for setting things up and I'm able to share files very easily but you should think about it so you can choose to have a quick connect right here I'm going to go ahead and skip it and now what I would really recommend adding is enable Synology active Insight it's a free license for up to three per account and DSM configuration backup both of these are free and it can just be very nice then now with DSM 7.2 you can also have email notifications which is just great so this way you don't have to have complex setups to get notified if anything's going on with the nas you can also help Synology with better data by enabling diagnostic services but that is up to you so I would definitely enable these three and then the fourth one is up to you so now we've just got in and this right here is DSM it's now popped up with the option to install three basic packages that a lot of people will use right off the bat so Synology photos is something I probably would recommend most home users install it allows you to easily manage all of your photos and even back up your iPhone or Android photo library to the nas then Synology drive and Synology office are really paired and they turn your Nas into much more of a Google Drive feel and so you can start editing documents on there you can share files with people very easily you can sync files to your computer a lot of stuff like that and so if you want to you can just install all those right now for the purpose of this video we're keeping it very basic I have dedicated videos for all of these so I'm just going to say no thanks and now it also recommends you enable two-factor authentication I'm not going to go over that because that's additional complex setups and I've got a video for that but if you are opening your app Nas to the internet I would highly recommend enabling two-factor authentication but I'm going to say no for now so now they have a tour that you can go through and run but instead we're going to keep this basic and just run through the most basic things so there are three apps that you're going to be using most often over here the first off is the package Center think of it like every other app store it's where you install all of your software on there and there's control panel control panel is where you can have all of your settings and that's where we're going to be setting up everything for now and then there's file station which will show you your files and you can see them also on your computer and things like that but it's a great web interface for your files really basic to use additional applications are up here and so the first thing we're going to go ahead and do is go into storage manager storage manager is where you go through and you actually set up your drives so we're going to go into a storage manager you may get a pop-up as well saying hey you don't have any volumes install one so you're going to click on storage manager and we are going to go ahead and install our first volume and pool so a pool is basically all hard drives grouped together and then a volume is where you put the data on top of that generally for the vast majority of users you're only going to have one pool one volume except for a specific case that I'm going to talk about in a minute here so we're going to hit start and we're going to choose our rate type I have a video going over different raid types that I will leave down the description it kind of explains them all for the vast majority of users I would recommend just shr or Raid 5 or Raid 6 depending on what you've got your setup with so anybody who has six discs or less go with shr or Raid 5 and if you have more than six discs I would recommend raid 6 or shr2 what this will give you is the ability for you to lose any one drive of the Raiden and you will keep all of your data and everything will continue running your Nas never even has to shut down that is not a backup but it is redundancy so it's very nice for that so you don't have to worry about a simple hard drive failure causing you to stop so you can select those all right here and if I had more drives in here I'd also see rated 5 and raid 6 and more things like that but we're just going to select simple shr if you do not want any redundancy at all and you just want to add it if all of your drives and you're okay if one drive fails the entire volume goes away you can choose either basic or jbod or Raid 0 if you're looking for the fastest possible speeds and you've got like ssds as a video editing server or something then raid zero but I've got a video I'll leave down in the description below that really goes over that but if you're okay with losing one drive due to fault tolerance so one drive of space just choose shr then you probably will not see this but I've got ssds and HDs in here so I could choose if it's a hard drive volume or an SSD volume and you can name it I'm not going to though now you select your drives I'm going to select both of these and we'll notice that even though we have two drives in here we're only going to get one drive worth of space and if I had a third Drive I would have gotten two drives worth of space because of that raid we talked about earlier one other thing to note these are eight terabyte drives right here but it's showing them as 7.3 terabytes what is going on so what is going on is these are a different unit this is what's called a Tibi byte which is essentially counting 1024 gigabytes is one table byte so it's a slightly different unit and so when you're at the terabyte scale it is off by about 10 percent when you look at it in Mac OS or Windows it will be the normal unit you see so it's not that the storage is not there you're just looking at it in a slightly different unit than you're used to so we're just going to go ahead and hit next and I would highly recommend performing the drive check it is going to take up to a couple days but what it'll do is it's going to kind of weed out any lemons so hard drives will often either fail in the first two weeks or after that they're going to last for years without issue generally that's because hard drives sometimes are just Dead on Arrival and normally that gets found out in the first two weeks so that's why you really want to perform the drive check and now we get to allocate our volume a volume is the file system that the data goes on top of so for the most basic setup we're just going to choose Max and allocate the maximum volume size next up we're going to choose our file system unless you have a very specific purpose or this is only for surveillance cameras choose btrfs trust me it is absolutely worth it so many features you will miss out on if you choose ext4 over btrfs definitely choose btrfest next up is encryption so this will be what's called Full volume encryption which means that if somebody steals your Nas they will not be able to recover any of the data off of it one warning here this means that if you lose this encryption key and you ever need to recover your Nas or anything like that and you lose the encryption key you will not be able to recover any of your data either so before taking this you should know one thing if you lose this file all your data is gone effectively maybe not now but sometime in the future so you need to make sure you have this file in a lot of places if this is really only for family documents and you're not worried about that happening you don't have to encrypt it but if this is for business and you're going to have sensitive documents on there encrypt it but make sure you know where you're going to store your key and store in a lot of places I'm going to go ahead and select encryption here and now it's going to ask me for a Vault password I'm going to enter one make sure that this is something that you are going to know I would highly recommend making this that password that your entire family knows or something like that because the only time somebody will ever even get a chance to use this is if they physically stolen your drive so it's definitely something that's worth it to make it guessable especially if this is something that if anything happens you want somebody else to be able to recover make it either guest pool or don't encrypt it at all that choice is up to you but just make sure you're going to be able to have a recovery if you need to which you do so I'm just going to enter password Here and now once we hit apply we're going to download a file and that is going to be a crucial file that you need to download so hit allow and now it's also going to pop up here as well that says yes I've received the recovery key and we'll keep it safe this recovery key right here that has just been downloaded go ahead upload it to your Google Drive send it out somewhere send it to your family you want to make sure it's going to be recoverable you should not store it on the nas because if you store it on the Nas and the nas needs it you're not going to have access to it so make sure that file is somewhere safe in a lot of places the only time someone will ever be able to utilize this file is if they have physical access to mass and they're trying to steal your data so I would absolutely feel comfortable posting on Google Drive because the chances of somebody breaking into my Google Drive also breaking into my house and stealing the Nas is so low that who cares at that point that is such a target attack there's probably a much easier way to get your data so make sure it is somewhere safe really really I'm going to hammer that home because you do not want to lose that key and one day have your files just disappeared one thing about this is it will work without that key for a very long time unless you ever need to recover anything and then all of a sudden it's just gone so you may become complacent and just say oh yeah it's working and just forget about the key seriously make sure it is somewhere and really make sure you know where it is I'm gonna try to hammer that home as much as possible all right we have now built the volume great the next thing we need to go ahead and do is just some very basic settings that I would really recommend so right now you can see is performing our Drive check so that is great what that means it's doing is it is going in and really kind of testing those drives to make sure they're not going to just die randomly so that's going to take a while and the NASA is going to be a little slower than usual while that's running in this case it's going to be about a day and a half the first thing we want to do is schedule data scrubbing and enable schedule and select all volumes and run it every three months you can also if you want to set it to only run at certain times so we can set it to only run at night and so it's only going to run from the hours of midnight to 5 a.m and so that way the performance hit that happens when the data is scrubbing you're not going to notice so that's really useful for like an office file server where people are actually working and they see it slow down home user it does not hurt the scrub only needs to complete within the three month period and it's fine so don't worry about that you could run it for an hour a week and it would probably still finish on time and then you can also set it to run later there's some customization in there you don't need to worry about but these settings right here perfect for just about everybody and what that's going to do is it's going to check all the files on the nasp to make sure that they have not gotten corrupted the cool thing about btrfest is if they are slightly corrupted like only one part of the file is corrupted it has the ability to automatically fix that without you doing anything and the scrub will automatically fix that the reason you want to run a scrub every three months is you want to make sure that the nas does not have time to get two errors in that section so if a hard drive has two errors on the same bit of data it might not be recoverable but as long as there's just one it is recoverable and so that way it gets caught before another one happens bit rot happens very rarely but it does happen and so that's why you want to run it often and it can really just protect you all right so quick interjection here nearly completely forgot to add this to the video so I'm cutting it a little bit later so one thing we need to do while we were in storage manager right here is we need to set up smart tests and they're very easy to set up you just go into HDD SSD and go into settings test scheduler and we want to enable a smart test a smart test essentially automatically has the nas test the disks for figuring out if they're going to fail soon discs are actually quite good at telling you when they're going to die not as good as ssds but it's always a good idea to run them so I'm going to say quick we're going to do a quick smart test test on all supported drives and we are just going to run it once a month easy enough to add in and then we are also going to add an extended smart for every six months the extended smart test in my experience very rarely actually gleams you more information than a short smart test but it's worth it to run every six months just in case it does ever help so we'll run the quick smart test once a month they run very quickly and that way you can keep up with the disc pretty well and it'll run an extended smart test every six months as an extra overhaul just in case you need it and that is it these are just two tests you want to set up really quick and easy just in case you ever need to have them you will get a notification like hey your drive is starting to die you'll actually also get a lot of this data without even having to use it because you still get things like uncs and a bunch of other useful information but it's just a good idea to have it on there and that way your health stats get updated a little bit more accurately and the driving start telling you hey this is what's going on I'm having issues I'm gonna die whatever I've got a video that probably should be out around the time of this that actually goes over exactly when to know when your hard drive is dying all right back the rest of the video now so now we want to go ahead and create our very first shared folder a shared folder is essentially a mapped drive in Windows or Mac OS and so that's where you're going to see a folder on there and you're going to be able to attach files to it so we're going to go into control panel shared folder create and create a new shared folder we're going to just give it a name and you can enable a recycling bin and description and choose your volume totally up to you on that but this is pretty simple next page gives us the ability to further encrypt it we don't need to because it's on an encrypted share anyway or set up with worm much more advanced features don't bother with those hit skip and then I would recommend enabling checksum for Advanced Data integrity that's a feature of btrfs and if you want to limit it to only having maybe a terabyte of data in there you can do that with the shared folder quota right there and just click through the next option gives us the ability to choose who has access to it we've only got the one user right now and I'm an administrator so I automatically get read write to everything but you can add stuff later on down the line and especially if you're a business user you want to check out groups so that way you can just have all of your employees in a group and give everybody permissions all at once rather than individually and now we have this shared folder so now this shared folder we can start seeing in Mac OS finder or Windows File Explorer very easily I'm just going to open up Mac OS finder really quick go into Network and we will see the name of the nas right here the ds923 that's what I named Nas this will be whatever you named it and Windows File Explorer has the exact same thing just double click on it and hit connect as and type in your Synology username and password that you just set up these steps are pretty much identical between Windows and Mac OS but I will leave a link down to how to do this in Windows File Explorer as well along with the timestamp where we actually are in this video and just type in your password and hit connect and now you can see the folder we enabled a recycling bin on there so it has automatically added that in there and this is looking very much like a regular hard drive to us so I'm just going to add in some files right here and I can just copy stuff over just like I would with any other external hard drive and edit folders adding everything in just as you would really you can kind of do exactly how you would with an external hard drive and so that is how we're able to access it I'm not going to talk about how to access it outside of your home yet I'm going to leave a link down the description below on how to do that because I've just covered it in a very in-depth video but there are ways to get this exact feel when you're outside the home network but if you're at home or at the office depending on where the Nas is you'll just be able to do that and you can have multiple users all working on the exact same file system all editing their own document everything like that because it's a Nas it's network attached so everybody on the network who has permissions and apps will be able to access it so now let's go back into DSM and see a couple of things that we really want to make sure to install to help protect our Nas so first off btrfest snapshots so we're going to go into the package Center and install btrfs snapshots so to open up a package Center you just have to accept the users and we're going to scroll down until we see a package called snapshot replication right here and we're just going to hit install and hit yes so BTR has snapshots are a combination of a recycling bin and like Mac OS time machine they allow you to go back to previous versions of files but they do not take up extra space so if you take a snapshot and no files have changed since the last snapshot that snapshot takes up zero space and so you can set these up and have the ability to go back to previous versions of files should you ever need them so it is now installed and so we're going to go ahead and hit open on it and we're just going to say do not show this message again I'm going to go back to that don't worry and now we're just going to go into snapshots and select our folder this is that new shared folder we set up every single time you add a new folder you want to add these settings in here by the way you can shift select multiple and add them all and I'm going to go over the basic settings here that everybody should do hit settings and we are going to enable a snapshot schedule we're going to have it run every two hours and you're not going to need immutable snapshots that's much more advanced feature and now for retention this is going to be the important part we're going to enable a retention policy and we're going to set it to be advanced so we're going to set the rules we're going to say keep all snapshots for five days and then we're going to untick everything else except for the day of the week for most people I would say 30 days the way you read this is you're going to have a snapshot the granularity of two hours for the past five days and then after that you're going to have a one day granularity for the past 30 days what this is effectively going to mean for you is from the moment you delete a file to the moment your space back will be 30 days because as long as there's a snapshot it's going to hold on the file and not let it get deleted and so you won't get your space back so whenever you're thinking about this you just need to think about that right there so for most people you're probably not deleting files that often and so 30 days should be totally fine you can also set this up to maybe even 60 days depending on your storage jeans and for people who very rarely delete files and end up with a lot of extra space I've done 180 days these are awesome because it allows you to go back to previous versions files and really protect yourself and so if your Nas gets ransomware like your computer gets a virus and starts encrypting files on the nas this is just an undo button incredibly powerful really really really set this up for every single shared folder you create I promise you it is worth it you're just going to hit okay and the last thing I like to do is make these snapshots visible right there because that allows you to very easily see the previous versions of files without having to mess with DSM or anything like that I'm not going to go over these in depth but I will leave a link to a video that I've gone in and really showed exactly how they work because it is well worth it for you to use but just know that they allow you to go back to previous versions files should you ever need them it's going to look like you've got 80 copies of the exact same file on your system it's going to look like that but it's not taking up 80 times the space it's not it's very efficient and it only is really holding on the files and so you should really think about it from the moment you a file to the moment your space back will be however many days you set there so that is huge I'll get off my soapbox with that and now we'll go in and we're going to go into control panel and set up a couple of things I like to do here first off we want to go into security and we want to make sure that under protection we have autoblock enabled 10 within five minutes is a great place to start this keeps people from being able to just raw password guess and so this is very very useful to have and so that way people just can't flood your Nas with random password guesses because they will get blocked very quickly these setups would take I think I calculated out as like 2.5 million years to have a 50 chance of guessing a eight digit password so yeah you're going to be safe with that don't worry about that even if somebody's doing nine every five minutes that's how long it would take for them to have a 50 chance of getting in firewall you probably do not need but I'll leave a link to a tutorial going over all that down in the description below and then account you can set up your two-factor authentication right here and a great thing here is the automatic MFA that happens with DSM 7.2 so if it's very weird of you you'll automatically be enrolled in that which is great and then the rest of these settings are not crucial the next thing we are going to go into is scroll down to power so these are a few power settings here I tend to like to enable restart automatically when power supply issue is fixed so that way if you have a power outage and the power comes back on your Nas Just boots back up automatically one thing you may want to look at buying is a UPS especially if it's for a business I would recommend the ups that will automatically allow your Nas to safely shut down before it runs out of power so that's what's called a smart UPS so essentially what that is is a battery that automatically kicks in if the power goes out and will tell your Nas hey we've only got about 10 minutes of power left you should go ahead and just shut down safely so that way you don't have a unexpected power loss which can cause issues in very rare circumstances so having a UPS can be very useful especially if it's for a business then one thing I always like to mention is if you ever have your Nas beeping come in here go to Hardware power General beep control and you can mute it and it will also tell you why it's beeping it's very hard to find that for people and so this is super useful to tell what's going on and why you're not beeping at you then you've got the fan speed mode for most people quiet and cool mode are all you're ever going to need but if you are running hot and you've got very hot hard drives you want the maximum performance and you're doing something hard you can run up to full speed mode but honestly cool mode normally will be good enough for just about everybody I very rarely need full speed mode ever unless it's in a really really really hot room and that's pretty much why and you can also have the LEDs change brightness and even have a schedule which is quite nice especially if it's in your bedroom power schedule allows you to boot up and shut down your Nas on a power schedule very rarely ever useful HDD hibernation I like to set this from 20 minutes to at least three hours generally that way you don't want your Nas having the drive spin up shut down spin up shut down spin up shut down a ton because it actually can lower the lifetime of the drives themselves generally NAS Drives are designed to run 24 7 and so having them spin up and start and stop actually can lower their life cycle and it can actually take a very long time if the NASA is hibernating to get back in so if you're very rarely using the nas you will also want to enable Advanced hibernation which goes really into a deep sleep but if you're using the nas daily you probably want to uncheck that the last important thing we want to go ahead and do down here is go into our task scheduler and we want to make sure we've got one really crucial task set up and that is to empty recycling bins I cannot over exaggerate how often this has been an issue for people because it's not something that's easily seen and so if you don't have a task that automatically empties the recycling bin the stuff that you delete will never get space back and so you want to set up a task that automatically empties recycling bins and I always just call it empty Ben and it's going to run every single night and it's going to say anything that has been in the recycling bin for more than three days the real stuff will be snapshots so snapshots are on top of this so This recycling bins only useful for that I deleted something I need to get it back right then and so for three days and we're going to empty all the recycling bins that should be good for pretty much everybody it's going to say do you want to enable risk like them in for all shared folders you can if you want to but I normally say no and that way the recycling bin just does not stack up a ton and now we've gone through really the basics I want to touch on a couple of things just really quickly with permissions so with permissions you want to go into users and groups and this is where you can start having multiple people able to log into the nas so especially if you're a business user and I would really recommend everybody do this you can set up everybody to have their own user account so say you've got a friend called Tem you just give them a random password and that way you can have them with their own account you don't want everybody to be an administrator so only people who really need to be an administrator should be an administrator and now you can say what folders they have permission to so let's give them access to demo we can also give them read only or read write I very rarely would ever use the no access button because by default they have no access and so it ends up overwriting the permissions you can look right here as the way the permissions work is no access overwrites everything read write then then read only so it's kind of a little bit more advanced but normally you're only going to be adding permissions rather than restricting them so we'll give him read write to there and we'll just click through and give him access whatever programs we'd like only if you ever need to and now he will be able to log in with his own password right in there and so that is an easy way to do permissions if you're a business you want to look at groups where you can essentially just add people to a group and then they will just use the permissions of that group to do everything really really efficient so now let's say we want to take away the permission from Tim we can do that either here so we can just go into the actual folder and hit edit and go into permissions and assign anybody who we want permission to it so we can say all right Tim actually we only want them to have read only and you can really set that up however you like to and so that is how you manage permissions for multiple users I'm not going to go over groups here but it is a really useful thing to have so you can have like a family group or an employees group and they all automatically have access to the shared folders the last thing I want to touch on with users is this admin user so this is the admin account that the internal system uses to manage everything so you cannot remove it but you want to make sure it's always deactivated so you should always have this deactivated because it is guessable somebody can guess the username admin so you want to make sure it's always deactivated and if you need a new admin account you create a new account and you add them to the administrators group but you never add them as the admin the one that is actually labeled admin it's a bit confusing there so that is just one thing to note all right and so that is pretty much it I want to now talk about a few really useful videos that I would highly recommend people watch to kind of get started and let me actually just pull up YouTube entirely all right so we are going to blaze through a few of these videos that I just think are really useful to know for more or less everybody one really good one to watch is the complete remote access guide by the way we will leave links to all these down in the description below so complete remote access guide that talks about all the different ways you can access your NAS from outside of your home network and so that really kind of goes over that entire setup if you're looking at upgrading this is probably something you should have watched before buying Nas best upgrade but that can be very useful then if you're looking at Synology photos this is a great guide to complete Synology photo guide goes over everything that you need to know to use Synology photos be from backing up your phone to sharing with people everything like that you need to do then definitely most commonly asked questions I try to go through these for people who have really never set up a Nas before and really have not used a Synology it's worth a watch it kind of just blaze through the most basic stuff that's kind of confusing I would have painted to this video If I had not already made that video then the most common mistakes that new users make probably worth a watch you should be covered for most of the stuff already on here but you probably want to then there's the last two things one is going to be backups I'm not going to touch on a ton here but if you're just starting out and you don't have a backup yet highly recommend getting an external drive and at least backing up your most important stuff that way if your hard drives crash or something crazy happens you have a backup so what backup methods to use really explains over all the different versions there and then finally if you want to learn more about btrvest snapshots this goes over everything about them and also how they work which is definitely worth a watch in my opinion so I really recommend checking those out I'll also leave a link to the Synology drive demo and kind of explaining how that works and that should be everything that really I would recommend watching to get started and understanding there's a lot of content there and so you don't necessarily have to watch all of them but watch the ones that are applicable to you and overall that should be set up and running your Nas is now running and you can easily add files to it and use it really like an external drive anytime you need to add files or new packages you just go into the package Center here and can just install anything you need to right there really simply and you can get more and more features out of your Nas by doing that there's a ton you can do all right well that's it for this go and leave any of the questions you've got for me down in the comments below and I also have forums.spacerex.com I'll leave a link to that there and for more explicit stuff YouTube's pretty bad about being able to actually have a conversation and so more advanced issues go ahead and post on the forums I'm checking it daily happy to reply there and that way especially future people who have the same issue can just find it via Google which is great all right have a good one bye [Music]

Channel: SpaceRex

Views: 150,056

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Id: T1xW97eyXB8

Length: 46min 8sec (2768 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 26 2023