COMPLETE Synology NAS Setup Guide for 2023 (Detailed for Beginners)

hey guys so in this video what we're going to do is we're going to take a brand new sonology Nest that has never been set up before and we're going to fully configure it now this is going to be a long video and in the timestamps below what I'm going to do is I'm going to break everything up into individual pieces because there's probably going to be something that you've already seen in this video but the goal is to walk you through the entire process from start to finish so if you watch this entire video from start to finish your Nas will be configured with some of the best practices and you'll also understand the DSM operating system potentially a little better than you currently do all right this is Frank from the future this video was a lot longer than I thought it was so two things one check out the written instructions in the description of the video if you want to remove some of the fluff because it will just give you the stepbystep guide that you can follow though this goes into much greater explanation so if you really really want to understand DSM this is it uh two those time stamps that are in the description will be extremely extremely helpful if you understand something we're going through and you just want to skip through it you'll be able to skip to the next chapter because the video goes through a lot but I'll do my best in the description to break it down and make the timestamps as descriptive as I can so that you can at least follow it and make the decision yourself so we're going to start from the very beginning so this device here as soon as you get it what you're going to do is you're going to plug your hard drives into it what I'd recommend there's a little I don't know if you could see it there's a little lock there after you put in your hard drives I'd recommend that you lock them in even if you think you're never going to go in and open it it's just better to ensure that you have that little protection but you're going to put your hard drives in it and then you're going to decide if you want to upgrade anything now the nas devices come standard you can just basically plug them in and start using them but some of these devices have certain certain features that you can upgrade for this device in specific I have upgraded the memory to 8 GB so certain devices will allow you to upgrade the memory this DS 923 plus happens to be one of them so the memory is upgraded to 8 GB on the back here if you can see it right here I have a 10 gbit Nick in it now the important thing is while everybody wants increased Network speeds you have to have the networking infrastructure to support that so what I mean by that is you have to have a switch that supports 10 gig and if you want a direct 10 gig line between a device and your sonology Nas what you actually need is the device to have a 10 gig Nick as well so 10 gig Nick what is that by default these Soni n devices come with one two here they are one two or four Nicks they're generally one or I think all of them are 1 gig Nicks so what that means is from a a speed perspective if you're transferring a file from your device to your Nas everything's hardwired the absolute fastest speed you're going to get is 125 megabytes per second that's best case scenario 10 gig just multiplies that by 10 think of it like a bigger pipe you can actually transfer larger files faster because the data can throughput faster than it could with a 1 GB Nick now there are things you can do with the device out of the box like SMB multi- channel to increase those speeds but we're getting a little ahead of ourselves we will talk about that later uh the only other thing that is installed in here are two nvme drives which can be used for caching or can be used as their own uh storage pools and volumes which we will take a look at a little later other than that this device is basically out of the box it has two 4 tbte hard drives and we are going to fully configure the DSM operating system now all right so up to this point what I did is I plugged in the DS 923 plus plugged the power into it and I plugged in a network cable so the very first thing that you have to do is you have to find the nas on your network so with a device that's connected to the same network what you have to do is you have to go to find. sony.com what this is going to do is it's going to search your local network for the actual device it's going to take a second if for some reason this does not work you have two other options that you could use the first is the sonology assistant which will basically do the same thing it'll scan your network and if that doesn't work I would recommend downloading a ip scanner that will basically check all of the devices I'll leave a link in the description to one of them that I have used in the past but uh generally what that will do is that'll scan all the devices on your network and it will look to see if the device is showing up at all but using one of those options you should be able to find the device so as soon as you find the device what you're going to see is it's going to come up with the server name IP address and all this other information here what we're going to do is Select connect at that point if you agree to the terms you can agree to the terms you can continue on with their privacy statement and then what it's going to do is it's going to start to go through the initial setup process for sonology DSM so I would recommend that you automatically download the latest version and then what it's going to do is any hard dve drives that you currently have plugged into the device it is going to delete all of the data on them so if you have any important data meaning that you're using these hard drives from another device you have to remove all the data before you get to this point as long as you agree and you understand that everything will be deleted you can select uh the checkbox and then you could select continue for me since there is data on these hard drives what I have to do is actually type in the model number but you probably won't have to do that and you can select delete all right so at this point DSM is going to start to install it's probably going to take a few minutes here nothing crazy but as soon as it finishes installing it's going to bring up the next stage which we're going to have to configure our user account and we'll get to that in a second all right so as soon as the operating system is installed DSM what it's going to do is it's going to reboot after 10 minutes it will automatically refresh this page in my experience it doesn't take that long it's probably going to be here in a second and when it does that means it's online and ready to go uh so if you hear an audible beep from the device itself that means it's ready all right so that was the audible beep that we were waiting for the actual Nas now is going to be installing some built-in applications uh and we're just going to have to wait a few seconds here and then we'll be able to set up our user account and then proceed with the full setup process okay so we are now at the DSM 7.2 setup process so what we're going to do is we are going to select start and then you're going to have to give your device a name and then you have to set up your user account recommend setting up something that is secure so I'm going to make this a little more secure and then this uh this checkbox here what it will do is it will allow your device to be displayed in the web assistant if you want to you can check it off if you don't want to you don't have to um there's not a right or wrong answer so basically find dos andy.com would display this device in the future if you check this off so you can select next and that will be the actual setup process for the user account now moving on to the next step here I'd recommend their recommendation which is to install important DSM and package updates only this will basically ensure that if there's anything any uh actual DSM updates that are important mostly for security uh it will automatically install install those everything else you will have to install manually I'd recommend you keep that on and then if you want to sign in with a sonology account you can these are some of the benefits of theology account we will sign in a little later so I'm going to skip that for now and then device analytics this is up to you you can either enable it or disable it I'm just going to keep it unchecked and submit and now what it's going to do is it's going to create your user account and then we're going to be able to move on here to actually accessing DSM so this is DSM I will do all this later two Factor authentication I would recommend that you enable I'm not going to enable it right now but you should have two-factor authentication enabled so we'll take a look at that a little later and this is adaptive MFA we could take a look at this later all right so we now have to create our storage pool and our volume so this is where all the data on your Nas is actually going to live so we're going to go through the actual setup process that they have and with dsm7 they really streamline this so this is not going to take that long but if you select create now it's going to walk you through the process of creating a storage pool in volume so we can click Start and now you have to pick your storage pool so you have a few options here and what you're going to see is I actually don't have all of the options and we'll get to that in a second so I have two hard drives installed right now what that means is I can utilize shr or Raid one personally I would not use Raid zero raid zero will increase the performance of the drives but any of the uh drives that fell will kill the whole storage pool so you generally don't want to do that what I'd recommend here is you actually open opsy raid calculator and I will leave a link in the description to that but what you can do is you can add in your total number of drives so for me what you'll see is I have two 4 tbte drives now I can't use Raid five and I can't use Raid six because I don't have enough hard drives if I go in and increase this to three you'll see that now I can utilize rate Five if I increase it to four you'll see that now I can utilize raate six so what's the difference between raate five raate six and shr and shr 2 so raid five will utilize the same sized hard drives so if you were to come in here and you were to replace these two 4 terab drives with we'll say 8 terabyte drives what you're going to see is that with raid five and raid six you'll be able to use them but you actually have 7.3 which is 8 terabytes you'll have four terabytes from two of the hard drives that is unusable and the reason for that is because with raid five or Raid six you can only use hard drives that are the same size and it will go based on the uh the lowest sized hard drive so if these were two terabyte hard drives it would be 2 terabytes across the board so what we'll do is we'll switch this to shr and what you'll see is it's actually different so shr is Sony's hybrid raid so what shr does is it allows you to use mixed sized hard drives and actually utilize some of the storage space from what I've read and I have not done any testing on this but from what I've read shr is slightly slower from a performance perspective than raid 5 is but the benefit is that you can actually utilize the hard drive space if you have mixed siiz drives so with shr and these hard drives here you'll have 14 1 12 terab of usable storage space but with raid five you'd only have 10.9 so the deciding factor here is ultimately going to be if you want flexibility or if you just want to use the same size hard drives there's not a right or wrong answer what you'll see is that with shr I can actually use shr and two 4 tbte drives but I cannot use Raid five so if if you want to use Raid five you have to have at least three hard drives if you want to use Raid six you have to have at least four the same is true for RAID 10 so raid zero I'd not recommend for an S uh but RAID 10 what you'll see is you don't have enough hard drives so you don't with three either so you have to go to four RAID 10 is raid 1 plus Z so it's basically a striped mirrored pair um for most people you're probably not going to use Ray 10 it is very good from a performance perspective um but for these small consumer nases that only have four drives you you probably don't want to use rate 10 but listen it's up to you if you want to use Raid 10 go for it so now the other thing to discuss with raid five raid six shr and shr2 is redundancy so from a redundant perspective raid five and shr can withstand one drive failure so that means if any of the hard drives in the actual storage pool fail you will not lose any of your data for raid six and shr2 it means that two hard drives can fail any two hard drives can fail in the storage pool without you losing any data so for most people you'll use shr Raid five as one option or shr2 raid six as the other option if you're using the same sized hard drives you probably want to use Raid five or Raid six if you're using different size hard drives mixed size hard drives you'd probably want to use shr or shr2 your sonology nass and the total hard drives that will be added to it will ultimately determine which is better from a redundancy perspective meaning raate five and shr or Raid 6 and shr2 if you have a 4bay Nas you probably want to use shr uh or Raid five and if you have an eight Bay Nas you probably want to use Raid six or shr2 so I'd recommend that you use this to determine what type of storage pool you want to set up so to get back into uh sonology DSM what I'm going to set up is I am going to set up shr so raid one is a mirrored pair I should mention that as well so raid one if you were to go back here so it's it's a mirrored pair so what it would allow you to do is just basically have two hard drives that are mirrored if one dies the other will be a direct mirror of that not going to set that up here I'm going to use shr now if you have nvme drives in the actual Nas like I said earlier you can create a storage pool off of the nvme drives I would not recommend you do that right now I'd recommend you stick to the actual hard drives keep in mind I should have mentioned this earlier the actual hard drive Bays you can put in 3 and 1/2 in hard drives or you can put in 2 and2 in ssds whatever you want to use it's up to you generally from a cost perspective you'll get a lot more storage space with three and 1 half inch hard drives than you will with 2 and 1 half in ssds but ssds will perform faster for various operations but majority of people are probably going to use 3 and 1 half inch hard drives so so we're going to go back to our SATA hard drives here and then we are going to select next and then we're going to select both of the hard drives and we're going to select next again and that's basically just adding them to the storage pool those two hard drives this is if you want to check the drives um if they're brand new drives I would recommend that you do this this will basically just go through and check the drives to make sure there aren't any bad blocks or anything if you do have any issues with the drives I would recommend that you change them um so if this is a brand new Nas and brand new hard drives I would recommend that you run a full scan on them and especially if they're new if it returns any errors replace the drive right away don't play games it's in the return window return it get a new drive and then go from there I'm going to skip that for now all right so for the volume capacity I would recommend I I'm this is tough I am a one volume person I I don't create multiple volumes I have had many questions on people that do um I'm going to set this to the maximum available size if you want to limit to a smaller size you can but this is basically going to be the actual size of the volume so this is where you're going to store your data the volume stores the data so for me it's going to be a little under 4 terabytes of data here but I'm just going to utilize the Max and then I'm going to select next and now it's the file system if you're using a Nas that supports btrfs I'd recommend that you use it sonology recommends that you'd use it it'll allow us to configure things like snapshots which we'll take a look at later and not actually utilize any real additional storage space we will take a look at that though ext4 in certain cases is slightly more performant I have not tested them side by side to say that it is definitely faster so take that with a grain of salt based on things I have read over the years but btrfs is going to be a better overall option for most people that's my opinion you can use ext4 if you want but I'm going to use btrfs and then I'm going to select next and this is going to be for volume encryption so for volume encryption this is going to be if you want to associate a password with this volume so that you have to unlock the volume to actually access it for most home users you're probably not going to need to do this you can configure a encrypted shared folder which we will take a look at a little later and I think that that makes a little bit more sense for people but if you want to encrypt the entire volume you can encrypt the entire volume I am not going to do that so I'm going to select next here and if you encrypt the entire volume there's going to be a few additional steps that you have to actually complete um it's just basically the steps necessary to encrypt the volume like I said I'm not doing that but you can so confirm the settings and select apply it will confir confirm once again that all the data on these hard drives will be erased you can select okay all right so we are now at the storage manager for DSM inside of here what I would recommend you do is a few things right off the bat schedule data scrubbing enable this and you're going to enable it on your storage pool and you can decide to run it either every 3 months or every 6 months I generally do every quarter um but twice a year at minimum and you can specify times in which you want to actually run these I'm not going to do that but you can specify specific times for it to run the performance will be impacted slightly so that's something that's important to keep in mind but honestly probably not something that's going to be noticeable unless you log into DSM itself so save that and it will actually run data scrubbing right away but there's nothing on the drive so it's going to basically just immediately finish and we have our volume here and everything we're using btrfs everything looks like it's configured well in the HDD SSD section what you'll see here is these are the two 3 and 1/2 in hard drives that I have available if you ever want to view the health info you can select them and click Health info and then smart and you can run individual tests on your hard drives if you didn't perform the hard drive checks earlier and you want to test these hard drives to make sure there's no issues you can do that like this I would recommend using an extended test if they're new hard drives make sure everything is good but you can go through and run those tests and you can ensure that everything is good um the M2 drives these are going to be used for potentially either a volume or SSD cache SSD cache is a very interesting one because the majority of people I've seen two camps people just buy the nvme drives because they kind of want the best of the best and other people say it's completely not worth it there's not necessarily a right or wrong answer SSD Cache can provide faster read and write times depending on what you use if you're using a read write cache which can be configured by going to the storage pool here and selecting create and then create SSD cache and what you'll see here is you'll have to mount it on a specific volume for us it's volume one and then you have two options read write cache and readon cache read write cache is a little riskier if an SS D fails at the exact same time as a right operation is occurring you might potentially have data corruption for that reason if you actually run through this you have to use they actually give you a disclaimer that data loss might occur but you have to use Raid one that's it so if you want to use uh nvme cach and you want it to be read write cach you have to use Raid one which is a mirrored pair so if one of the nvme drives dies you'll have a second one so hopefully you won't lose any data if you go back to read only cache you'll see that you can actually use Raid zero or Raid one um for most people it's going to be raid zero is probably what you will use that will allow you to use both of the nvme drives basically as one SSD that's probably the best way to look at it so you'll have uh double the performance but if either of them fail you will lose the entire um SSD cache but because it's raid only there's no risk of data loss so raid zero is the way to go um I'll set up actually I'm not going to set up anything um we'll quickly look I'm not going to set this up we'll quickly look at uh creating a storage pool so if you wanted to create an nvme storage pool you would have to go through the same thing and you know select whatever raid type you'd like to use this is just saying that you can't hot swap uh the nvme drives which we know and then you would have to select the drives you can perform or skip the drive checks and it's basically the same thing so what you'll so if you wanted to use the if you wanted to create an nvme storage pool that is exactly how you would do it um envm storage pools I haven't used I haven't seen many people using them I think they'd be very good for virtual machines which uh you can configure virtual machines on your Nas so if you want to set up nvme storage pools for your virtual machines only and just separate them I think that's a great option uh other than that if you want increased performance for your drives especially if you're using 10 gig networking uh you Pro you're probably better off with SSD cache all right so we're at the same step as before and I'm just going to go through and create this readon cache and it'll say the drives have been erased and it will run through and configure that okay so we now have our storage pool configured we have nvme cache configured in a raid zero readon cache and for the storage manager that's kind of it um hot spare you can if you have an unused drive and you just want to leave it as a hot spare in case one of the hard drives in the pool was to die uh it'll automatically start to use that hot spare so that it'll basically rebuild the storage pool and the volume on that hot spare drive so you have uh an immediate fix for hard drives that have failures if they ever go into a critical State I have seen some people use that I have not personally done that uh with any of my Nas devices but if you are using something like raid 6 if you have a I don't know an 8 bay Nas and you're using something like raid six you can run through and configure this and it's a great option for additional protection in case any of the drives fail so from the storage pool that's it we are now brought back to the DSM operating system in which we will continue to configure it so we are now inside of DSM and what we're going to do the first thing we're going to do is open up the control panel the first thing I think that makes the most sense to walk through is this user and group section so by default the admin user is dis disabled it's best to keep this disabled but what you'll see is the user account we configured before is actually part of the administrator group so inside of these users and groups what you actually have is you have multiple um groups that users will be a part of by default so the system default group users users are part of by default HTTP is for web services I personally haven't really used those but you might um and inside of the users you can go through and you can actually create different users give them a password and then what it will actually allow you to do is specify what groups they should be a part of so for your administrators group or at least the way that I normally do it is I have an administrator user that I access DSM with and then I have a regular user that I'll go through and access all the shared folders with which we will get to a little later you don't have to do it that way but that's how I do it now inside of here any of the groups that you create will actually uh exist here and then you can go through and add this user to a specific group when we get to Shared folders it'll make a little bit more sense than it makes right now but the idea is that you want specific groups for specific users based on whatever access they should have now if you're just a home user and you have a few people that are going to be accessing your Nas you probably don't have to do this but this is how you would do it if you wanted to okay so at this point that's the users and groups we're going to get to this we're going to go back to this in a second um but what I want to do here is I want to create a shared folder and I quickly want to talk through the shared folder uh what's the best way to describe it the shared folder hierarchy that's probably the best way to describe it so I'm going to use your media as an example so let's say you have media files the media files are TV shows uh music movies maybe you have some home videos on it um every single one of those can be its own shared folder or you can create one shared folder named media and inside of the media folder you can create four different subfolders which you can then add all of your media to the deciding factor in my opinion should be who should have access to it so for example if your if everybody should have access to the movies TV shows and music then you create a media folder give everybody access to it and then inside of that media folder you can create those three subfolders and then everybody will have access to that but if certain users shouldn't have access to any of that and we'll use home videos as an example what you really want to do is you want to create different shared folders for that because inside of the actual shared folder you can configure unique permissions but it gets very messy so I like to change permissions on a shared folder folder level so let's quickly walk through what I just said inside of the shared folder here we're going to create a shared folder and we're going to name it media inside of here if you don't want this shared folder to show up in the my network places you can check that off and hide subfolders and files from users without permission uh this will basically be for when you access the shared folder you can enable this or disable it based on uh the information that you see here and basically whatever you really want recycle bin I would recommend that you enable the recycle bin some people don't but I'd recommend that you enable it and we'll take a look at a recycle bin emptying schedule a little later uh but the recycle bin just ensures that if a file gets deleted it will go to the recycle bin it won't be permanently deleted so moving on here this is what we talked about a little earlier so you you can encrypt this folder and you have two options that you can do when you protect a shared folder by encrypting it you can set up an encryption key which is just a password and it'll actually download an actual key as well and you will need one of them in order to mount the shared folder and access it so that is encrypting the shared folder if you want to protect the shared folder with write once so write once read many this is an interesting one so write once read many is truthfully something that home users are probably not going to use sonology has a white paper on it and if you think you want to actually use this I would recommend you read through this and see if it makes sense for whatever use case you have um businesses small businesses I would say are the users that could potentially use it and then it goes all the way up to Enterprise uh but for home users this is probably not something that home users would use but the option is there if you want to use it so depending on if you want to encrypt this shared folder I'm just going to show you if you select next here you have to type in an uh uh encryption key and you should do something secure here but what you really then at that point would have is in order to mount this shared folder you would have to enter in that password in order to mount it so it's encrypted until you mount it and as soon as you mount it then it's accessible on the na just like any other shared folder so you're really protecting the actual mounting of the shared folder rather than the contents of the shared folder because until it's mounted you can't access it and then once it's mounted you can access it so encryption is a unique one if you have data that you're storing on your Nas and you really want to make sure that that people can't access it and periodically you have to mount it to just view the contents or update the contents I do think encryption is a great option but for a media folder you're not going to use encryption most likely so I'm going to skip that here enable data check some for Advanced Data Integrity so a little earlier we enabled uh scheduled data scrubbing data scrubbing will basically self-heal your files in the event that anything happens to the data so think of Silent corruption things like that in order to fix those issues you have to use data scrubbing in order for data scrubbing to work you have to have this option enabled so assuming that you're using btrfs I would recommend that you keep this on that's a setting that I would recommend basically you turn on if you're using btrfs every time I don't see any real reason not to um shared folder quota this will just say that the folder can't get above we'll say one terabyte you don't have to use this uh but it is something that you could use and file compression if it will actually lower the uh performance of the shared folder but it will compress the data I don't really use this I don't have any side by side um information on exactly how well it works but if you're storing pictures that you never access you might want to actually enable it for that but the performance will be impacted so we're going to select next and we're going to select next again and then we are going to get to the permissions so like I said earlier we have local users and we have local groups the users that you create will have rewrite access but then in this local group section you'll see users here so if you have users and you want all of your users on your Nas to always access all of the shared folders it's a good idea to come in here and Grant the read write permission or readon whatever you'd prefer to that individual group if you have a small user base and you just want to manage permissions on an individual user level you can do that as well all of your users will be here any groups that you have created will be here and system internal users these are really just actual users for some of the packages that exist on the nas you're probably not going to go in here ever um you do have to configure it for Plex if you're using the Plex package but we could discuss that later so at that point as soon as you apply this our first shared folder has been created so if we open up file station you'll see see that this is the media folder that we just created and like I said earlier we can come in here and we can create subfolders for all of our media now like I said you can actually modify individual permissions for a specific subfolder I would not recommend that you do that it's going to be a pain to manage so in the case of what we said earlier where we have our home movies and we don't want anybody to see them outside of specific users but this data is a little less private what we would do is go inside of here and we can create a new shared folder called home movies and then we can run through the same process that we ran through earlier and we can create it so the difference is that now the Home Movies folder can have a different permission level than the media folder so if we had a bunch of users in here or a bunch of groups in here we can go in and explicitly set what permissions should exist for whatever shared folder we have so I'll apply that but the one thing that I want to talk about going back to the users in the groups is when you edit a specific user in this permission tab what you're going to see and this is an admin user so it's not a great example but what you're going to see here is that the user preview shows their permissions if you specify no access the user will not have access to that shared folder so when there is a conflict between user and group permissions the the permission is determined by level in the order no access read write read only so what that means is that if you specify no access on the user level or the group level the user will not have access to it if you specify read write permission they will have access to it but if they have readon access anywhere else they're going to have read WR permission and if you specify read only and read write or no access is not specified then they will have readon permission so what I did is I went through and I created a new user called Frank test and what you'll see here is that the user does not have access to anything and the reason is because they're part of the user's group but the users group does not have access to any of those shared folders so we have two ways that we could fix this let's say we want to give all of our users permission to the media folder we can either do it individually so if you have a small subset of users you can come in here and specify and then what you'll see is in the preview they have read write permission or you can say readon and then they'll have readon permission you could do it that way or you can go in and edit the users group and you could say you want this users group to have readon permission on the media folder and then what you'll see is if we go back and we edit Frank test go to permissions you will see that on the media folder we have readon permission so that's the power of creating users and groups you can get permission through the group or you can get permission through the user account depending on how many users you have one option will be better than others if you have 15 users you're going to want to create groups if you have three users you probably can just manage it on a user level not a right or wrong answer some of these other settings uh the only other important thing I'd say in here is the application section so if you want to explicitly say that this this user should not be able to access DSM and should not be able to access file station for example then you can go in there and explicitly deny it or vice versa you can you can uh allow it so everything else inside of here is for the most part fairly straightforward um there are some advanced settings this is really just password settings so if you have multiple users and you want to you know specify that they have to include a special character and you know their password expires after X amount of time you can do that user home service this is used for specific applications so when you enable the user home service it's going to enable it on the actual volume so when you apply it what you'll see is inside a file station we have a new homes folder and every single one of our users has a folder so think of the homes folder like a individual space so my user account Frank has his own home folder and my user account Frank test has his own home folder and both users cannot see each other's home data so the important Point here is that administrators can see everything that's kind of just theault but if I was to come in here inside of this Frank I create a folder here what you'll see is in my home folder so this is my home folder under the Frank user account which I'm currently signed in as it's here so they're a mirror of each other because homes with an S is all of your users on the Nas and their user account so if Frank test came in here and how to edit a bunch of files it would be in the individual homes folder for that user and they would basically have a private section to add their their data outside of Administrators being able to see everything always remember that certain applications use this so sonology photos uses it um for photo backups sonology Drive uses it for personal uh documents so certain applications will use that home folder and you will have to enable it for some of those applications but if you want to enable it for specific users to have their own private space you can do that for it'll make a little bit more sense if you watch my video on sonology drive but we'll talk about sonology drive a little later we went through we created a shared folder we created a new user we changed the permissions on on that what we're going to talk about now is actually accessing that shared folder so we created a shared folder but we have not actually added any data to it so inside of DSM if you wanted to just drag and drop a file here you could I would not recommend that you do that um but but in certain situations I'm sure that you you could it makes sense I have used it in the past that way um but you have a few ways that you can access your your data the first is through file station St so with file station there is actually a file station web server here and if you wanted to customize the port we'll just say that 701 and went to the IP address and the port 70001 that we just configured you would be able to access this so this is a web version of sonology file station so if you sign out of this what you'll see is it's its own application so if you had users and you wanted them to access the data through a web browser you could use this file station to actually access that data so like I said earlier same idea you have all of your files all of your data that you have access to you can drag and drop files and then you can just manage it through here if you want to but most people are going to utilize these file services so inside of here we have file services and most people are probably going to use SMB so SMB will allow you to access the shared folder through a Mac or a PC by actually accessing it through either finder or Windows Explorer so what you'll see here is it is enabled by default and there are some advanced settings that you could specify if you really wanted to um the only thing I would recommend you look at is SMB multi- Channel inside of here there's a bunch of other permissions but without going too far into detail because I have a full video on SMB multi Channel and this is an advanced feature um SMB multi channel will allow you to increase the actual uh throughput to the nas so you can have faster transfer speeds if you were transferring a file from your device to your Nas SMB multi- channel is a more advanced feature you don't have to set that up now if you do want to set it up after you get through this whole video you can watch the SM SMB multi Channel video I will leave a link to it in the description but everything else all these other settings can stay as default so we have the SMB uh service enabled which is this top section here and in order to access it we can access it by using this at the bottom so I am on a Mac right now and if I was to go back to my desktop and hit command K what you'll see here is that there is the connected server so I am going to type in SMB SL and you can reference this by this line right here SMB SL and then this is the actual host name I'm going to type in the IP address so it's 10.2.0 59 and then I'm going to select connect and then it's going to find it it's going to select connect and then this is going to be the user account on the nas so I'm going to sign in with my admin user account which I said earlier you shouldn't do but that's okay and then we're going to access our our we'll say home movies and there you go we now have access to our shared folder on our NES so if I wanted to upload data from my device to my Nas you can just drag and drop it and it will add it and then inside of here you will see if you open file station that in the Home Movies folder the folder that we just created exists so access in SMB on your device is probably one of the easiest ways that you can transfer data back and forth it transfers it through your network so it's going to be slower than you're probably used to that's where SMB multi- Channel could work uh to increase those speeds but you have to have two devices that support it watch the video if you want to do it or you set up increased networking uh throughput by setting up something like 10 10 gig which I showed in the very beginning um that is how you can actually add files so you might be asking well why didn't I see this media folder well I didn't see that media folder because remember we hid the the folder in my network places so if I wanted to what I could do is hit command K come in here type in media for SL media because that's the name of the folder connect to it and now we have our uh data so that is what that setting will do on Windows it's slightly different I'll overlay some video right now but you basically just open up a run command and then you will type in uh back SLB slash the IP address of the Nas and then either the folder or you can just access the Nas and access whatever you have permission to on the nas which naturally leads us into the next step so we just accessed our Nas through the IP address address or the host name if you did it that way but the IP address can change so if you're using your Nas you generally wanted to have a static IP address a static local IP address what that means is that the IP address will never change this means that if you reference it the same way that I just did you're always going to access the nas it's not going to change on a reboot or something like that and you won't be able to find it so there's two ways you could do that the first way is by setting up a DHCP reservation on your router that is the better way of doing it because it will ensure that your DHCP server which is on your router will basically never hand out that IP address to any other device if you can change it on your router you should I can't show that because every single router is going to be different but the easy way that you could do that on your nest as well and like I said not necessarily the preferred option but an easy way you can do it is by going to the network section selecting network interface finding that uh network interface that is currently connected selecting edit and then select use manual configuration so at this point all these three the subnet mask Gateway DNS server this is generally stuff that can stay as default um DHCP which is what it was initially set to means that it will go to your router and try to get an IP address very important for accessing the nas the first time because you need to be able to get an IP address for it but moving forward you want that IP address to stay the same so that it never changes you can do this on every single one of these interfaces so the only other thing I'll mention is that this is the 10 gig um network interface card I am in an environment right now where I don't have a 10 gig switch normally this Nest is somewhere else uh but if you have a 10 gig uh switch and you have the 10 gig Nick Plus plugged in this is where you would configure that as well so all of your network interfaces if you have a Nas that has four uh Network ports they'll all be listed here this page will look different but the key is that you can set a static IP address on every single one of the interfaces if you really want to or on your router which is preferable and at that point you can just leave this as DHCP because your router will never try and hand out a different IP address but this is the quick and dirty way to ensure that the IP address does not change so now that we talked through the networking settings let's look at some of these security settings so the reality is from a security perspective with your Nas you generally want to limit access to it from external locations if it's on your local network and only on your local network only the people on your local network can access it so what does that allow us to do well what that ensures is that you you would basically have to have your network compromised either by a different device or a bad actor that's connected to your home network in order to attempt to access the actual Nest so there's still security measures on the nas here which we'll take a look at so getting access to the nas doesn't automatically mean that they're going to have permission to it but a few things that we could change the first is the admin account make sure it stays as disabled which it does by default because the easiest thing to try and log into the easiest user account is admin it's disabled nobody can access it through that so you're fine some of these other settings we're going to take a look at is in the protection Here auto block is enabled by default this will ensure that if somebody tries to log in 10 times and fails within 5 minutes that IP address will be blocked now you can set a block expiration so if you want to say after you know 3 days that IP address will unblock you can do that if you don't want to you don't have to you can keep this checked denial of service you can turn this on uh this is really not going to impact you on your local network but if you're exposing your Nas which I would not recommend you do but if you exposing your Nas that is a setting that you can enable to basically just protect uh from potential denial of service attacks in the account section so I would recommend that you do set up to two Factor authentication for your admin account so in order to do that you can go into the personal settings here you can go to security and you can configure two Factor authentication and what this will allow you to do you basically just have to run through the steps you can either download the uh sonology application on your mobile phone and do it that way or you can just use a verification code most people have a two-factor authentication app in this day and age and what it would allow you to do is actually run through after you type your password in and it will allow you to configure two-factor authentication what this means is that if anybody was to access your actual user account meaning that they had access to your password they need a second factor in order to access it so it's a a number that changes every 30 seconds and it ensures if somebody gets access to your password they still do not have access to this second Factor so they won't be able to access the account for admin accounts you should definitely enable it for user accounts it's up to you but it does depend on what the user has access to if it's a user that has access to all of your data you might want to enable it if it's a user that doesn't then you won't now this only protects the login so if you're accessing a shared folder through SMB two Factor authentication is not used so that's where from a security perspective things get a little fuzzy because if somebody has access to your local network they could potentially try and attack it using a different you know attack Point than if it was exposed externally and they only had access to DSM just a few things to Think Through The Point here is that you want to enable two Factor authentication at minimum for your user accounts and if you really want to enable it for everybody you can enforce it and ensure that they do that the only difference is that you'll have to configure the email service and if you click okay it will walk through how you can do that uh but you'll have to set up a user Serv Gmail is honestly the easiest you just sign in with your Gmail account and then it will use that uh moving forward some of these other things the firewall is an interesting one because I use the firewall and I use Sony's firewall because I want to ensure that nobody has access to anything unless I specifically allow it and it kind of keeps me in check as a new user you probably don't want to use the firewall and if you're not exposing your Nas externally it's even less important but what this allows you to do is actually go in and specify what specific Services you want users to be able to access so if you wanted users to access SMB for example this Windows file server even though it says windows it's actually for Windows and Mac because it's ports I think 139 and 445 um the SMB service utilizes those ports so if you enable the firewall and you can't access your Nas through SMB it's because you have to create a firewall rule so I have a full video and article on the firewall this is an advanced feature I would not recommend you set it up right now but after you fully configure your Nas if you do want to set it up this is where you can do it the only other thing I want to point out here is that as you can see we are accessing the nas on 10.2.0 59 that's the IP address Port 5000 so this is the HTTP Port so if we go to login portal what you'll see here is HTTP is 5,000 this means that the traffic to and from the Nas is unencrypted when I'm accessing DSM itself I like to use https which is Port 50001 so if I was to put 50001 in here I would get the actual https which is encrypted um I'd like to turn on this automatically redirect HTTP connection to https and as soon as you save that what it will do is it's going to restart the web service and you're going to see here in a second that we're going to go from Port 5000 to 50001 the only thing here is that you might have to actually go in yep there you go you're going to get a certificate error because you don't have a valid certificate that's okay you are local and the traffic is still encrypted and what you'll see now is we have https and Port 50001 if you want to get rid of that error and it's it's not an error it's a warning but if you you want to get rid of that you have to set up a certificate you can either do a self-sign certificate there's various ways you could do it um this is probably not something you have to worry about right now but that error will be there until you set up a valid certificate not going over that so inside of this login portal the only other things I'll say is that if you want to change these ports from 5,000 50001 to something and anything different you can so 5,000 and 50001 are the ports first anology DSM if you're exposing your nest externally you absolutely want to change these for the majority of people you don't have to worry about it um but if you want to change it which we will we'll do 6250 and 6251 what you'll see here is as soon as you save it what it's actually going to do is it's once again going to restart that that web server and then you'll have to use that New Port and now you can access it but if you try to access it on Port 51 you're not going to be able to and the reason is because we just changed the port from 51 to 6251 so moving forward you would have to access it this way that option here this automatically redirect HTTP requests if you try to get to the HTTP version meaning HTTP and the HTTP Port if you access it it will automatically forward you to the https Port that's why I like to turn it so that is some security settings we're going to talk about data protection in a little bit but from a security perspective those are some of the DSM settings you can kind of change the only other thing I want to talk through is a UPS a UPS is basically a battery backup what it ensures is if your house ever loses power or wherever this is plugged in ever loses power the n will stay online for as long as that battery will last for so if you're buying a Nas that costs hundreds to potentially thousands of dollars with the hard drives included you really want to purchase a UPS you don't have to get anything fancy you know some people will recommend that you use UPS devices that are pure sinewave which is the cleanest form of power you don't have to worry about any of that I'm not going to say that there aren't better and worse UPS devices but if you're comparing a you know device a Nas that doesn't have a UPS versus one that does it's better to have one that does than one that doesn't now if you want to go down the rabbit hole of UPS devices and start looking at pure sine wve Nas devices that are hundreds of dollars you are free to do that but something's better than nothing that's the important part so what I have is I have a 600 watt APC UPS that has a USB port on it what that USB port allows me to do is monitor the UPS through the nas so what I mean by that is when I click this enable UPS support button because the UPS right now is plugged into the nas through the USB port I can actually access this device and I can see that it's fully charged and it's connected so inside of here there are other settings these settings are if you have a UPS server set up somewhere don't worry about that you're going to be accessing and connecting it through USB so you have two options here you can leave the nas on until the battery is low in the UPS so that is basically going to run through the entire battery once it hits a low state it will automatically make the Nasco into standby mode if you want to customize it to say that I want this to go off as soon as the UPS turns on but after 5 minutes you can do do that as well there's not a right or wrong answer here it is whatever you'd prefer few other things uh you can shut down the UPS when the system enters standby mode I would probably not recommend that um and network UPS server this will allow you to actually have other devices listen to the nas if they want to shut down so if you have multiple PCS we'll say plugged into the UPS what this setting will allow you to do is actually allow those devices to listen and see that it's on battery power and shut down Advanced functionality you don't have to worry about it you literally have to check this box make sure that you can connect to it by uh selecting this device information and then apply it if you don't want to get a UPS you run the risk of data corruption in the event of a power outage it's not guaranteed it's going to happen but if you're writing to your storage pool and you lose power at the right time you could lose the entire storage pool and at that point you're out of luck the only thing you can really do is restore from a backup to get your data back because you're not going to be able to recover that pool is it something that happens frequently I can't comment on it I have a UPS but it is something that can happen so for how much these cost I think they're like 50 bucks it's worth it in my opinion and if you want a bigger one because you want to put multiple things on it they have various sizes I'll leave a few links the description to devices that I think you could use but the important Point here get yourself a UPS that's all I'm going to going to really say on that okay so now that the UPS is configured let's quickly take a look in syy package Center so you first have to agree to the terms if you agree and this is where you're going to install all of the sonology packages now I'm going to talk through a few of them here but the point is that depending on exactly what you're trying to to do you're probably going to install different ones we are going to walk through the ones that I consider to be the most important but we'll talk through a few of them so a lot of these applications here are basically just either like a sync tool or a way to manage the data potential DNS server these are all just default packages you'll see that some of them are installed by default because these are packages that's anology pre-installed on the nas um but some of them have to be installed so a few that I want to point out here Sony drive server this is my personal favorite Sony Nas application uh the setup process is way too long to go through in this video but I have a full video that I did recently on how you can configure this I'll leave a link in the description because you should finish this process and then potentially look to install that but sonology drive will allow you to sync data back and forth from your device to your Nas it's a different way of accessing your data so rather than using SMB which we went over earlier you could actually store the data on your physical device edit it on your physical device and it will automatically sync back and forth to your Nas love sonology Drive sonology photos is basically a photo backup tool so what you can do is you can actually download and install a mobile application on your phone and then it will allow you to configure a mobile backup and you can view all of the data uh all of your photos and your videos on your mobile device and have them live on your Nas pretty cool application uh virtual machine manager will allow you to install virtual machines if you want it to set up any virtual machines definitely out of scope uh for this and then the only other one I want to talk about is container manager so if you've ever uh wanted to install Docker containers container manager will allow you to do that this application will basically really transform how powerful this Nas is definitely an advanced feature I have a full video on container manager as well that I will leave in the description uh but you could look at that later all of this other stuff are just different applications that you can install okay so now that we looked through some of these applications I really want to talk through two main applications that you will use for data protection purposes so to jump right back into it the first thing that I recommend you install is Snapshot replication and once that is installed we are going to then quickly install hyper backup as well so as soon as they are installed you can close out of here and what you'll see is if you click this app section you'll have both new applications so we're first going to take a look at snapshots so snapshots will allow you to basically freeze a shared folder at a point in time this is good for things like ransomware or just basic backup and and restore purposes snapshots are something that for all of the important data on your Nas any of the shared folders that have important data and realistically you could set it up on all of them but you want to configure a snapshot schedule so if you select snapshots what you'll see here is these are your shared folders so I'm just going to walk through one of them we'll do this media folder here but in the settings here if you select it you can enable a snapshot schedule now from there you can specify exactly when this snapshot should run generally want to run it daily um at least that's what I'd recommend and then you could specify the time we'll do daily at 2 a.m. a mutable snapshots this will depend on the type of Nas that you have but an immutable snapshot will basically ensure that the snapshot cannot be deleted for any reason based on however long of a duration you specify so if you check this off and you specify 3 days this will ensure that no matter what you do this snapshot cannot be deleted now keep that in mind whatever you do the snapshot can't be deleted so if you enable this and dump a bunch of data you have to wait 3 days in order for you to potentially reclaim any of that storage space so this is a more advanced feature but it's great for ransomware because if you were to think of a bad actor that got access to your Nas and encrypted all of your files knew what they were doing and then went in and actually deleted all your snapshots you're at a luck with IM mutable snapshots that's not the case because you have a protection period in x amount of days where you will ensure that all of that data is fine Advanced feature I'm not going to use it right now but based on whatever you're storing you might want to use it retention the retention policy is very important so you basically can keep the last x amount of snapshots that is this first option here the second option is going to be in days so this is a little different if you're taking one snapshot a day then yes both of these options are the same because this is going to basically be 128 days here but let's say you actually set this snapshot schedule up to be I don't know every hour now you're going to have 24 snapshots a day and if you keep all snapshots for 7 days what that means is that you're going to have all of those 24 snap shots for 7 days but if you keep 128 versions of that snapshot you will have 128 versions of that snapshot so basically 128 restore points in hourly increments if that makes any sense not a right or wrong answer really depends on this schedule here so if you're setting it for every day you could just use this option or you could do an advanced retention policy and you can actually specify how often and how many versions you actually want to keep um this could be powerful but keep in mind that if you're keeping a snapshot from a year ago you're actually utilizing whatever storage space was on that snapshot so you're going to be utilizing more storage space than if you didn't use this because basically if you delete a file today it's not actually going to be removed from the nas until next year so this is a more advanced f function we'll say not from the sense of advanced functionality that's difficult to use but advanced in the sense that you want to make sure that you keep only the amount of snapshots that you actually think you might have to restore from but what I will say is there was one point in my life that I would have liked to go back to this past snapshot uh from a year ago because it was a file that was deleted that I had really no idea was deleted and when I actually needed I was like uh snapshot period is has expired so that file is gone I was able to to actually restore it from a backup but we'll take a look at backups in a second here but the the retention policy is is kind of important based on whatever you uh plan on doing so we're going to set this for S days and we're going to select okay and now the snapshot will be scheduled so at some point tonight it will run through and it will take a snapshot you can take manual snapshots you can take a snapshot and you can lock it locking it just means that you you uh will have to manually delete it it won't automatically delete based on your retention policy and you can even do a manual uh a mutable snapshot so I'm going to take a snapshot here just to show you how this works but what you'll see is in this snapshot list we actually have a snapshot that's the snapshot I just took so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into this media folder and I'm going to delete all this stuff and this media folder all the folders I had are now gone what I'm going to do is I'm going to look at my Snapshot list I'm going to select it and I'm going to browse it and if you browse it it says make snapshot visible what that means is in file station you will now have this snapshot folder that's what visible means but you will see here that all three of those folders are back so what I could do at that point is I could either go through and and manually copy them over or if it's just an individual file I can go and find that file copy it back to the shared folder or different option is let's say we didn't want to do it this way so we're going to go into the advanced settings for this folder and we're going to do that so that the snapshot is not visible and then you'll see the data still does not exist so in the event of ransomware you probably don't want to do it that way what you'd have to do is actually restore the entire shared folder what snapshots will allow you to do is in this recovery tab you can select recover on whatever shared folder it is browse to the actual version that you want to restore and restore the snapshot so you can take a snapshot before restoring if you wanted to in my case this is just a blank folder so you can even restore the settings of the shared folder but none of the permissions changed if permissions changed you might want to do that and as soon as you hit okay what it's actually going to do is in the background it will run through and it will restore that folder and what you'll see is all of our data is back so I've used snapshots as a first line of defense if I have a file or folder that is deleted I go back to the snapshot and I restore it snapshots you have to utilize btrfs for it which was the btrfs volume we configured um I think you can actually configure it with ext4 but it's not going to utilize D duplication so you're going to take up a ton of storage space uh btrfs is preferred for this option and something that I think everybody should use um so snapshots are the first line of defense now snapshots are not a backup if for some reason this storage pool was to corrupt that data is gone nothing we could do to restore it because the snapshot is part of the storage pool storage pool is corrupt it's gone at that point when you have to configure is a backup so we're going to look at hyper backup hyper backup will allow you to back up your Nas so what you'll see here is as soon as you launch it you'll have a few options here you can actually back up the entire nass if you wanted to that that includes everything all your shared folders all your packages everything if you ever had to restore from it the actual hyper backup archive will basically be a restoration of that entire Nas for me in this video we're not going to do that we're going to just do the shared folder but as soon as you select it you will have a few options here so these are the destinations for where you can actually back up the data so my personal favorite option I use back Blaze B2 I'm not sponsored by them I don't have any affiliate links I'm just telling you who I personally use that's done through the S3 storage option here but you don't have to use them if you just have a small amount of data or you have a Google Drive account that you want to utilize or Dropbox you can do that as well the other thing you can do is you can actually back up to a remote Nas so if you have a second sonology Nas and it's somewhere offsite for example you can actually back up to an off-site Nas third option which is what most people would do is a USB external USB drive so I'll leave a few links in the description for external USB drives that you could use that I know work but basically you just plug in the external hard drive directly into the Nas and you would see okay so to just show you how this works I just plugged in an 8 gig USB stick which would never be used for this but just to show you um and in file station what you'll see is I now have a USB share folder that USB share folder is actually that device you can see all of your devices in the control panel by selecting external devices and it'll all be listed here so inside of hyper backup here if I actually close out of this and recreate that task and select USB multiple versions I will have that USB share and then what I'd be able to do is go through and select whatever I want to actually back up to it we back everything up to it including the applications you can back up all the applications if you want as well and then you specify the backup so I will run this daily at 3:00 a.m. the only other thing you might want to enable is client side encryption client side encryption will encrypt this back up in order for you to actually access it you're going to need the password when you use it and you configure a password it will also um provide an encryption key so you'll need either the encryption key which is a file or this password in order to actually access the um the data if you're backing up off site somewhere in the cloud I would recommend that you use that if you're backing up locally to USB drive it's up to you I mean if somebody was to come and physically take the device they'd be able to access the data on it so from that perspective maybe you want to but if it's all in your house and you feel comfortable you don't have to do this for this test I'm not going to enable this um the only other thing is for USB drive drives remove destination external device when backup task has successfully finished this is a blessing in a curse because you will then remove the drive after the backup runs so God forbid anybody was to access the nas they can't access the files on the actual USB drive but it's a curse in the sense that it's going to stay ejected until you you know add it back it's up to you it's it's better to to automatically it's better to keep this on but it's also a lot more inconvenient so the choice is yours so then I'm going to select next backup rotation this is just the number of versions that we're going to keep I'm going to set this to 30 and then done and then what you will see is that it'll ask you to back up so it will quickly run through the backup now this is a backup so this is a backup from your Nas to a secondary device potentially even in the cloud and you can restore that data okay so this um USB stick is obviously not big enough to do this so it's it failed for that reason so what I did is I just configured a second task and I just moved it to we're backing up the media folders we're actually backing up all the data on the nas to the whole movies folder just just so I could show you how this works but the idea is that if a snapshot is compromised meaning that you can't access the snapshots and you know that doesn't work and you have to actually restore the data you can restore it right from here so to show you the same example we will delete all the data inside of this media folder and it's gone and then what we will do is we will use the backup Explorer to navigate to this and then we can actually select the three of them we can select restore on the file all right so it restored all the folders back to the media folder and you'll see now they're back they're all there so this is how you would do a hyper backup restore um everything that you have in the backup will be shown here and on the bottom here you'll have versions so if you have 30 versions of the file you'll be able to go back you know however many versions it is till it exists and actually restore that individual uh file or folder but the key here is this is a backup so unlike snapshots which is not a backup this is a backup just keep in mind that if you're using an external hard drive and it's directly next to the nas someone can either take the external hard drive or in a worst case scenario where the actual Nas is compromised meaning that have a bit of fire or something like that the hard drive is going to be gone too so that's why people say for a 321 backup you want three copies of your data on at least two separate mediums with one offsite the offsite protects from that scenario so that is snapshots and Hyper backup so a backup of the NAS from a data protection standpoint in my opinion those are the most important things that you can configure you have to configure backups and snapshots this will protect you in scenarios that you probably can't even think about right now so just trust me there's going to come a point where you need that and you do want to set that up so we now talked through the package Center so like I said there are a ton of applications that you can install and one way or another every one of these applications will do something different uh you can go through and based on whatever you're trying to do you can configure it but the next thing I want to quickly talk through is remote access so the most common thing is that you set up your Nas it's configured the way you want it has your data on it but you leave your house now and you lose access to it so you need to come up with a way to to access that data remotely I have a video on five ways that you could do it but I'm going to quickly summarize it here that video goes a little more in depth I'm going to quickly summarize it here the best option in my opinion is through a VPN if you have a VPN on your router you can configure it there you configure openvpn or wire guard if you have it on there if you want a separate device you can run it on a Raspberry Pi you can run openvpn or uh wire gon on a Raspberry Pi as well and I have tutorials for a lot of this that I'll leave in the description but if you want to access it and configure it on your Nas as well you can do that so inside of the package Center there is a VPN server application that you can install and what this will allow you to do is configure openvpn on your Nas now it's a full setup process I have an article that will walk through the entire thing but the idea is that if you open up the V the VPN server you can enable the VPN server and change all these settings honestly just quickly looking at this all of this is fine um allow clients to access servers Lan that would basically allow you to access the other devices on your local network so when you set up a VPN you're not only accessing your Nas you're accessing all of the devices on your local network so this could be beneficial if you have to open you know if you have to access another device you can do it through this so the VPN could be for multiple purposes um the thing I'll say is after you apply it it'll have a configuration file that you'll have to edit and modify you will have to port forward so you'll have to port forward on your router to your Nas this is a bigger setup process so I don't really want to go any deeper into this and it's definitely an advanced feature but the idea is that you will have a secure tunnel from whatever location you're at back to your home network where your Nas lives and at that point you connect to the VPN and then you will be able to connect to your Nas that is the most secure option you have to be able to port forward though um if you don't want to do this whole setup there's actually a package in the package Center called tal scale tal scale is a zero config VPN so I have a video on this as well but it's a extremely extremely easy to set this up you would be able to get this set up in probably 5 or 10 minutes downside is you're relying on a third party so this is not going to be a self-hosted VPN server this is going to be a VPN server that you connect to so if tail scale is ever having any problems you wouldn't be able to access your data but I love tail scale and I have a bunch of people I know that regularly use it and it just works so well and it's so easy to set up and if you cannot p P forward or you do not feel comfortable port forwarding tail scale will actually allow you to access all of your services and everything directly through that without having to do really any advanced setup it's very very easy so check that uh article out if you want to set up tail scale so those are your VPN options those are the options that I would recommend the easiest option by a landslide is Quick Connect so inside of the external access here there is the Quick Connect setting here and you'll have to sign into to your sonology account which I will quickly do okay so if you don't have a sonology account you're going to have to set that up if you want to use Quick Connect but the idea here is that you can come in and type in a quick connect ID and then when you apply that what it will do is it will connect back to the sonology servers and then it will allow you to access it through that quick connect ID few few notes Here in the advanced settings these are the applications that you can access so you can access DSM you can access uh all these Services sonology photo sonology Drive um all these mobile applications all of these Services you could share files externally and it does use a relay service so um sonology will relay the traffic to your Nas it's not going to be the best from a performance perspective perspective a VPN would be better self-hosted VPN would be best um at least in comparison to this if you're using port forwarding and that's the best performance but I digress so um a VPN would perform better than this but this is a lot easier I signed into my sonology account I enabled quick connect and now I can basically access all these Services through this quick connect ID so if you access if you pull up sonology drive on your mobile phone it'll ask you for a quick connect ID or a uh IP address if you type in the Quick Connect ID that I have here wondertech testing what that would actually allow you to do is sign in to that actual service from wherever you are and you would be able to access that service that's how simple it is so that's option two option three would be ddns so you can configure ddns and ddns basically will track your external IP address so remember top here 10.2.0 59 that's our internal IP address your external IP address you have one of them it's given to you by your ISP generally it changes so ddns will always track it if forever for whatever reason it changes you would by using that ddns host name be able to access that external IP address from wherever you are downside is it requires port forwarding so if you use ddns to access your Nas external you have to change this port you have to make sure it's something different than 50001 because Port scanners will scan for 5,000 and 50001 and you will be hit with the tax I can almost promise you that's number one number two I don't recommend you do this I'm just telling you that you can do it um it'll be the best performance because it's going to be a direct connection from whatever location you're at to your actual Nas but you have to utilize port forwarding it's not secure and it's just not something I recommend but you can do it uh the only other thing you could do is configure a reverse proxy I'm not even going to talk through that because a reverse proxy you have to own your own domain um you have to port forward and it works differently um I do love reverse proxies I think they're great but I have an article that I will leave in the description if you really do want to configure that because it is something that is a little bit more advanced than I really want to get to in this video um those are the ways that you can access your Nas outside of your local network if you go to a friend's house and you type in this local IP address on their Network you're not going to access your Nas um you have to have a way back to your local network to access your Nas that's the main thing to remember um a lot of this other stuff is really just some best practice settings so I mentioned this earlier I have a full article that removes all the fluff so that article will be basically a step-by-step guide on exactly what I think you should do all the settings I think you should have enabled removed all the fluff um and it's just kind of a real short it's not a short article but it's a a short and suet in the sense that it says this is what I think you should do this is why I think you should do it and this is where you can find it the few things that I will quickly talk through that are in that article is the recycle bin empty schedule so on the task scheduler make sure you go to create schedule task and then recycle bin and then from there you can create a task you can make sure it runs daily and then you want to empty all of your recycle bins but you probably want to do it after let's say 14 days if you don't set up a recycle bin m in task what it's actually going to do is it's going to store all of that data so when you delete a file it's never going to be removed from your Nas you have to set this up or you have to manually empty this the recycle bin there's not a right or wrong answer the reason I recommend this is because most people forget to manually do it so by doing this you're ensuring that it will actually work when you need it to work so we we'll click okay on that and we will set that up everything else here I think we did a pretty good job of going through everything um there's there's a lot more to this um notifications you you know this will be the final thing I I'll talk through notifications you want to set up notifications because there's going to come a point in time where this Nas is something that you don't log into regularly and when that time comes you're going to want notifications in case something goes wrong so if you set up you know data scrubbing and it doesn't work properly if you have a bad hard drive if something happens on your Nas you have to make sure that you're notified of it because there's going to come a point where you go from logging into this daily to weekly to monthly to maybe even less frequently than that setting up notifications will ensure that if anything happens you are notified of it all you have to do is set up the email which we talked about a little earlier so you could use Gmail if you want so when you set that up what it will do is it will actually set up a recipient profile here and then you're going to see rules there's going to be a default profile but those rules will be based on basically all of these rules so you'll see external storage if you know the connection failed the big ones are going to be uh potentially in the power system if you want to know when your UPS turns on and then more importantly would be in the storage in case you have any you know hard drive issues you'll be notified of them you really want to set these up because this will ensure that the nas informs you if anything goes wrong so like I said email configure email I'm not signed in right now otherwise I would but it's very straightforward you're just going to sign into your Gmail account configure that and then you'll have a setting here where you can actually go in and modify what you want to get alerted on and there might be things you're going to get alerted on that you don't want to get alerted on so you can disable those as well okay so there are going to be other settings I'm probably forgetting but at this point you're going to have a full sonology Nas set up following some of the best practices that you can use and you can slowly start to build on top of it so like I said earlier there are a lot of different things that you can do with this device even just creating Docker containers stuff like that that you might want to start exploring but you're not currently ready to do that you can do all of that at this point because the Nas is configured following some of the best practices and hopefully you understand the DSM operating system a little better than you did uh most of it is really just creating the shared folders you'll have to go through and obviously create more of those and then potentially create your users and you'll have to go through and slowly Tinker a little bit around but for the most part the Nas is configured the way that it should be and you can start to use it so lot of tutorials that I will leave in the description son Drive container manager five ways you can access your nest remotely stuff like that those are all videos you can use to build on top of what you currently have but this video walked through it all so I'm hopeful that you found this video helpful if you did please give it a thumbs up if you like this type of content please consider subscribing to the channel and if you have any questions feel free to leave them in the comments thanks guys

Channel: WunderTech

Views: 16,260

Keywords: Synology NAS Setup, Synology NAS Guide, Synology NAS Beginner's Guide, Setup a Synology NAS, Synology NAS Setup Guide, Synology NAS Setup Process, First-Time Synology NAS Setup, Brand New Synology NAS Setup

Id: rrvtu9z22u0

Length: 89min 45sec (5385 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 25 2023