COMPLETE Guide to Synology Drive - Create your OWN CLOUD

all right how's it going y'all so today we're going to be going over how to set up a sonology Nas as a true Cloud using sonology drive so this is basically going to mimic the functionality of like Google drive or Dropbox where you essentially can have all the files Cloud synced to your computer but they're not download until you click on them through sonology office you can also basically make your own Google Drive where you have multiple people collaborating on the same file and it's all just saved on the web interface really like how Google Drive works there's also a component of this that is much like Google Drive where there's the my drive where essentially every single person will have their own little space on the nas which is just where their stuff goes so that way they don't have to clutter up other people's things and whoever's logged in sees their own folder and we're going to go over that in depth because it can be a bit confusing now I will say this is not necessarily for everyone this works great for most home users and most business applications especially where you've got remote employees but where this gets a little difficult is specifically when you're trying to Video Edit off of this and you just have to be very disciplined I go over all that in a different video but for the most part this workflow works great for graphic designers and other things like that who just need to access their files and it's really great for home users especially because you don't want to worry about are you on the network are you remote you just want to be able to open up your PDFs and your tax documents and things like that wherever you are from either your phone or your computer and that's exactly what we're going to be going over here all right so the first step is we're going to go ahead andell senology drive so go ahead and log into DSM right here and then just go into package Center and search drive and install sonology Drive server so now that we've installed this it has installed three different packages sonology Drive which is the web interface which is essentially just think of it like Google drive or Dropbox that same web interface it's where you actually access your files and share links and things like that sonology drive share syn syn which allows you to sync two sonies together using syy drive so you can have a Synology in another office and they stay in sync and so that way if one person modifies a file on one Nas as soon as possible it is modified in the exact same way on the other Nas and finally sonology Drive admin console where we set all of this up we're also going to install one additional package called sonology office so essentially sonology office is your documents as well so this way you can actually Ed documents in the web interface no it's not like you can edit Word documents and then save them on your computer and edit them as a Word document on their computer now this is really designed just like Google Drive where if you want to create a document here it's really designed to be only editable on the web interface of sonology drive or on the app so this is not necessarily going to be for everyone they are putting a lot of work into this and it is getting a lot better but it is not necessarily for every single person because it is not like you can just save Word documents here you have to kind of convert them and back and forth now while this is installing I do want to add one additional caveat you have to have sonology Drive installed if you want to install sonology office if you just go straight to office and hit install it'll actually install son drive but it is actually just a addition to the son drive package rather than its own individual package if that makes sense all right so now that all those packages are installed let's go ahead and first dive into the sonology drive admin console where we can go ahead and essentially get our little tour and it's going to first take us to our team folder and we're going to see that nothing's enabled so I have not enabled the home folder already if you have it would show up as enabled here and we can see that we've got a bunch of our different shared folders right here that we can choose to add versions to and enable them in sonology drive so first off let's go ahead and just say all right we're going to use the management and the HR folder for this now we have the option to set up Version Control so Version Control is a lot like Google drive or Dropbox Version Control in the web interface you can see all the edits and go back to them in time and you've got a few different options here first off how many versions you're keeping of a given file and then how do you want to rotate them when that number is hit do you want to rotate the earliest versions or do you want intell versioning so if you do the earliest versioning you're basically always going to have the eight most recent edits if you do intella versioning what it's going to do is it is essentially going to keep one or two old ones and then a little bit more of the recent ones so you're going to have them spread out a little bit more rather than your just most recent eight then for everybody I would really recommend checking this box right here rotate versions regularly because if you don't you basically never get these versions back and they they never get removed for people who are going to have tens of thousands of files I do not recommend enabling versions here because it does have a significant amount of overhead required to do it because there has to be a database that contains every single file and every single version of that file and so in general unless this is just going to be around a th files I would not generally enable versioning unless you really have a need for it from my experience most people don't use it and a much better version of versioning that does not have any overhead to it is snapshots and I've talked about that in a zillion other videos but for this case we're actually going to just leave versioning enabled just for the sake of this demo but watch out for your performance there if you do have a ton of files and you need the fastest performance there is also the new security tab where you can actually go in and set up additional pieces here where you can say how often people can download it and things like that and we'll go ahead and add in our Advanced features to go over that as well that is much more of a business feature though so most home users probably do not want it so now the way these permissions work is exactly the same as they work in file station or on SMB the users all are set up there and you'll notice well I just missed it in the upper right hand corner over here we saw a indexing there's not a ton of files in here so it indexed very quickly but if you've got thousands of files it can take while to index these especially if there are a ton of videos and photos because actually what it does is it has to generate a JPEG preview and index every single one of the files for each file so that way in the sonology drive web interface you can see a quick thumbnail without having to download the 30 megabyte file all right so now that we've got those two team folders enabled let's go ahead and open up the sonology Drive app this is that Google Drive interface that really as you can see it's trying to act a lot like Google Drive so we can see the two shared folders We enabled as sonology Drive team folders in here the reason they're showing up for me is I actually have permission through DSM to those folders so if I go into control panel over here shared folder management you will see that under my permissions I'm logged in with will I have read right to it and so it shows up in a team folder if Sally were to log in Sally has no access so Sally would actually not see this folder at all under team folders so it's completely hidden from them and right here it works very similar to how any other Google Drive Works essentially you can actually upload files directly through this interface if you want to so it'll just go ahead and upload straight into there you can also rightclick and share a file with somebody either locally where it's only people who have a user account on the nas or publicly where anybody with the link can view and you can set up password and expirations on that as well and so this right here is that same Google Drive interface that a lot of people really like but there's one other thing that is currently not here that personal folder so for example if you're a family and you want everybody just have their own space to sck stuff this is great for your own photo backups your own documents you just don't want cluttering up other people's space that's where the home folder is great so we're going to go in and just enable that and by default it'll actually ask you to enable it when you install this for the very first time and so most people already have this enabled so to enable it if it's disabled you go into users in group Advanced scroll down to enable users home service and just hit apply so now as soon as we do that we're going to be able to refresh right here and boom it's immediately enabled as a syy drive folder and now if I refresh my actual web app right here we'll see that we've got my drive and this is unique to whoever signed in the team folders are all going to be shared so if I drop a file in management and Sally has access to management she's going to see the exact same management folder as I do but if she's logged in with Sally she's going to see Sally's drive and not mine and that's all going to be under the home folder so we'll just go ahead and create a new folder and just to show this on the other end we can go into file station and see that actually under the homes folder this is what was created so every single user on the Nas is their own home folder and they're all stored in the homes folder only admins can see this then I'm signed in with user will so if I look in my home folder boom this is that demo folder I created right there so it's just another view of your home folder there the exact same thing it's just presented in a slightly different way and so this is where you can really have your own own stuff and I like that a lot though you do have to understand it before using it don't stick stuff in here and expect other people to be able to access it unless you're sharing it through sonology drive but in general you really want to keep shared files in a team folder because it makes everything a lot easier all right so now while we're in here let's also go check out the syy office component of this this is where you've got essentially a ability to build Google Docs Google Sheets and Google Slides I think they're called so you can go ahead and basically create the exact same setup here now it's not like they're compatible or anything it's they're both just very similar setups so we go ahead and create a new document and go ahead and name it other than the fact that I can't type it works pretty similar to how you would expect things to work you can comment if you use sonology chat you can use that here as well to talk about stuff you've got your fonts it's not a perfect word processor but it actually works pretty decently you can go ahead and you see it's constantly saving every single time I do anything it saves within a matter of seconds so it's just like that you don't even hit save to close instead you just close it as soon as you're done and then when we open it back up vaa it's right there you can also go ahead and view your version history though we do not have really anything here just yet now this also works where if this was in a team f fer multiple people would be able to edit it at the exact same time and you'd see their cursors just like you do in Google Drive you also have the ability to download it as a Word document or a PDF super useful I really recommend anytime you send a business a file PDF it just because PDFs always work obviously if they need to edit it Word document probably works better for that but in general PDF stuff because PDFs always send the exact same way whereas Word documents and other stuff just just do not you can also choose where to move it to so I could actually drop this in the management folder if I wanted to you can also just rename up here and all the very very very basic stuff here it's actually pretty decent for what it is and they've put honestly a lot of calories into it and it shows so this is actually a pretty useful tool though I don't think right now A lot of people are using it just yet so we can see it is on in there you also have the ability to use your recent folder so this is stuff that you have recently modified and opened up you can see you're shared with me and shared with others so if something's in my my drive and I want somebody else to be able to access it just like Google Drive you can hit share and there are two different options permissions and public link if you want to share it directly and only that one user can do it you actually use the permissions you can either just create a link link and anybody with the link can view it who's got an account on the nas or private where you actually get to say a specific user or group can do whatever they want with it and there's different options here manager all the way up to just previewer and here is actually what tells you what options they have so it's pretty much anything you would need right there and so then Sally would see under her shared with me this demo folder right here because I put her as a manager she would be able to actually modify things and so that is where you can get that same level of permissions you can also star and add labels and all that good stuff and so you can get really organized if You' like it to and so that is the overall web interface but what most people actually want to use is actually the computer version where it's on your phone and also on your desktop and to set this up to make this easiest we're going to be using quickconnect there's a bunch of options there if you want to use Quick Connect or not I cover in other videos but especially if you are a home user just setting this up enabling Quick Connect makes this very easy so I'm just going to create a quick connect ID and then right here we've now got it set up so I'm going to go ahead and open up my sonology drive app I've actually already got it up here if you've not installed it you should do that and and I'm just going to go ahead and create a new sonology Drive share sync task if you are on Mac OS you need to be on Macos 14.2 I believe to use the on demand sync but we're going to talk about that here in a minute so first off let's go ahead and just create a new one and the first time you install sonology Drive you'll get this you'll also see whenever you open up sonology drive for the first time in the lower right hand corner it says get the desktop and mobile apps and it's got a link to download them otherwise you go to the downloads page so right here we're going to go ahead and set up a new one and this screen right here is actually what you see if you're setting up a new Nas and you've not set up sonology drive before since this laptop's already using sonology drive to my Nas it actually already has it in there in general you would just see this so we're going to say DS 923 demo which is our Quick Connect ID over here windows are on top of each other DS 923 demo so we're using that exact same one and then we're just going to sign in with our username and password all right so now that you've signed in you get this interface right here this is a sync job we'll also talk about backup tasks in a second here sync jobs are exactly what they sound like they sync the nas with your computer and if you see this option right here on demand sync allows it to not actually take up space on your computer on Mac OS this actually just uses the iCloud protocol on Windows it works very similar we are going to go ahead and choose our home folder which is our my drive folder we're going to enable on demand sync if we want to do a full sync where all the files are always on our computer we could choose a folder and if you're on Windows you choose a folder no matter what my recommendation for people who are doing that is to go ahead and hit change put it in your folder or wherever you want it to go and then don't check this create empty Synology drive folder instead create your own folder and check it like that so the reason I like to do that is because now I can choose exactly what it's called and everything like that versus just sonology drive note if you uncheck this and you put it in a folder like your will folder it's going to copy everything up to the nas so if you're going to do that I would highly recommend either creating an empty folder like I just did there leaving this checked so it will create an empty folder for you or knowing that you in fact want everything synced and for Windows users this is actually how you're going to set up on demand sync as well so Windows users can toggle back and forth between on demand sync and full sync Mac OS users cannot Mac OS users have to either set it up as on demand sync or full sync because it uses an entirely separate protocol so since I'm on Mac OS instead I'm just going to hit enable on demand sync and give it a task name so it's going to show up in our sidebar as sonology Drive Dome if you've only got one drive hooked up with sonology drive on demand sync it'll show show up as just sonology drive and now we're going to hit done so now we can go ahead and click on this and we will see it in Finder right here so if you're on Mac OS and you're setting up for the very first time you'll have to hit enable but I've already set this up before and so we'll see right over here to the left we see it right here and we see the same Cloud icon where files are not actually stored on our computer until we double click on it but we can still interact with these files exactly as we would with anything else so let me just go ahead and dump a screenshot or two in here and it's working exactly like a regular file station is except it is only downloading files when we double click on them so we'll see that when I made that modification boom right there it is automatically uploaded and they stay in sync you can also share directly out of this by saying get link and you can actually create a public link directly from here so you probably will want to use your quit connect if you're using a different method you can use that but this right here will allow you to create a link that people can actually access and see so I'm going to open up a new private browser to not be logged in to show that it works when you're not logged into the a computer voila that is what a external user would see note this is currently slow because a private browser on Safari uses iCloud private relay and so it's not connecting locally long story but it would be faster if I was not on a private browser or if I had the ports open but I'm going to talk about that at the end and so that's exactly how this works you can also tell it to automatically download the file by saying pin local copy permanently that will always have it pinned until you tell other wise and you can also say free up space which will say okay delete any files locally but they'll still be in the cloud so I can say free up space on the parent level folder and we'll see right here that the cloud icon comes back but you still get a JPEG preview it's a very small preview and as soon as we double click on it we're going to see it download and it opens the full resolution file so it's very useful in that sense and it literally uses the iCloud protocol for this on Mac OS Windows once again is working very similar you can also choose team folders for this as well now let's go in and we can go in and add in more settings we also have the ability to come in and do a backup task and backup tasks can be pretty useful because you can just say okay I just want to be able to back up this folder this folder this folder and this folder and to a specified location so say I want to be able to back up my I'll do my pictures folder you've got options here for how you'd like to do it if you're doing something with like Lightroom or something that has a database on it don't do continuous instead do a schedule so we can say daily once a day and now what it's going to do is it's just going to back up all that data directly to our my drive folder though you will note one thing I don't believe it will show up yeah it will not show up in your son drive my drive folder so backup tasks are the one thing that don't show up in your son drive folder just because that would be recursive and confusing so instead they're only going to show up on the web interface and on the homes folder but specifically through syy drive on demand sync they don't show up here but we can just view those files voila just like that you can see everything in there and it's just going to always be backing that up up once a day you'll also see in these logs often that you will see a bunch of failures with Mac OS they're going to be things like thumbs.db or. DS stores those things don't worry about it because they are not really useful files or needed if it's an actual file that you recognize then check out what happened but a lot of times you'll just get notified for that and those are files that just don't need to be synced all right and so that is how the syy drive client works I think it works really well and quick connect make this a lot easier now I do want to finally touch on at the end of this video how to speed this up so this is going to work very quickly when we're on our local network because it's going to have a direct connection to the nas but when we're outside of our local network sonology drive this client right here uses port 6690 to speed things up so if you're looking for the fastest possible speeds and you don't want to worry about setting VPN server and things like that that are pretty complex and in a lot of ways overkill for home users check out how to open up Port 6690 TCP from the router to the Nas and if you want to be able to share files with people very quickly through this web interface right here that is going to use port 50001 by default and so that is a very useful thing to have so if you don't know about how Port Forum Works we've got a video Linked In the description below the last thing I do want to talk about is some of the useful things that you can also do in here that are great new features under Advanced features that we'll go ahead and activate so this is similar to how active back of for business activates you basically just have to sign in with a sonology account and say yes I do have it it's not like it costs money or anything I think they just restrict it because it's open source software and this is their secret sauce that they actually kind of put behind a wall so once you activate it you've got options that are really useful for businesses so if you're going to be letting an employee go you can actually remotely wipe their sonology Drive stuff beforehand so they don't have anything downloaded to their computer you can also say Okay add a watermark anytime something gets downloaded or you can restrict downloads there's a lot of useful features here and they're set up on a team folder basis so if I wanted to come in here and say I'm letting myself go and I want to make sure that none of the files are stored on their computer before doing so I can actually hit unlink here and then there's this option right here to remote wipe it as soon as they come online so this is not going to wipe out their entire computer it's only going to remove the sonology drive synced folders when it comes online so that is useful obviously you have to make that very clear to your employees if you're doing this on their personal laptops I'm not going to go into the morals and Logistics and the legalities of that but that feature is there and it's very useful especially if you need to be able to make sure you maintain these files obviously this does not keep people from being able to move files out of this folder beforehand but it is a nice tool in the bag for specific use cases you can also come in here under settings and actually restrict out who's allowed to share files that they have to use password protection you can see a shared link report of everybody who's downloaded and everyone that's been sent you can choose a specific customized link I generally recommend Quick Connect if you're set up with that if you've got a special domain you can use that as well you also can say who is allowed to sync specific stuff there is a ton of useful settings in here and if you're using a C2 hybrid share you can actually choose a few users who actually use C2 to SN with analy Drive rather than the actual local computer and there's a bunch of other stuff here that can be very very useful they've made this almost Google Drive level abilities to administrate and you can even say okay this person's quitting I need to transfer all their files to this person which is really really nice to have and keeps things going very well all right so there's obviously a ton more stuff here but that is pretty much the gist for how to get setup and going I really like using sonology drive on demand sync to just have access to all your files really easily it works great in Windows and about 99% there in Mac OS there's always some hiccups but for most people who are just using basic files it works phenomenally and I've started using it more and more if you have any questions or you want to hire me there's a link for that down description below and put your questions down in the comments below all right have a good one [Music] bye w

Channel: SpaceRex

Views: 13,551

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Id: QTInhv8esXs

Length: 26min 30sec (1590 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 20 2024