How to Set Up & Configure Synology Drive (Beginners Tutorial)

if I told you that Synology Drive was the one application that I can't live without you probably wouldn't believe me but I'm going to tell you why in this video but before we get to that point I want to explain what Synology Drive is how you could set it up some of its Advanced features and then we'll get to why I consider it to be my favorite application so let's take a look at what Synology Drive is Synology Drive is a private Cloud what that means is that all of your files will live on the Synology Nas and they'll be accessible from your other devices Synology Drive can be compared to tools like Google Drive Microsoft's OneDrive or Dropbox the only difference is that Central location will exist on your Nas as opposed to in the cloud now after you set up all of the Synology Drive clients and everything which we'll take a look at a little later in this video when you create a file on one of your devices it will automatically sync from that device to your Nas and it'll be accessible on all of your other devices so that Central Hub will be your Nas at that point it makes things like getting a new computer or Sim simply accessing your files on a different device easy because they'll automatically sync to that device and they'll be accessible no matter where you are now in order to get to that point we have to actually set up Synology drive so what we're going to do is we're going to quickly switch over to DSM we're going to set it up we're going to take a look at the client setup and then we'll move on from there so we're going to walk through the setup process pretty quickly but in the description I have written instructions that you can follow which will walk through the entire process from setting up the admin console to setting up individual clients and even more advanced features like on-demand sync so that is in the description of the video when you can follow along there so the point we're at here is that the Synology Drive application is installed in DSM if you haven't done that just open up the package Center search for Synology drive and you can install it there as soon as you launch the tool you're going to be brought to the admin console you have to make sure you access the admin console and then you'll be able to manage all of your drives and all of your team folders and we'll quickly walk through all the important settings here now outside of the team folder location you're going to have different shared folders the shared folders that are listed here will have to be enabled if you want to be able to access them from Synology Drive clients so the first one and arguably the most important one is the my drive section the mydrive section uses a user's home folder if you don't know how the home folder works it basically allows each individual user on your Nas to actually have a location where their personal files can be stored so it's a little confusing inside of DSM because if you open DSM I'm sorry if you open file station as an admin you'll see a home folder and a homes with an S folder the homes folder with an S will have individual usernames inside of it and if you expand those folders it will be all of their personal files the home folder will be the home folder for that specific user that you're currently logged into so you can kind of ignore that for this video but it's important to note the difference and if you were to access the home folder and then you would look at the user account that you're currently logged in as and the files inside of that the files will match because they are the same now the my drive section requires that the user Home Service be currently set up and activated in the written instructions I have exactly how you can do that but the idea is that if you enable it if you currently don't have it enabled if you enable it it'll walk you through the process of enabling that but as soon as that's enabled you'll be able to go in and enable the my drive so teamfolders are slightly different when you go in and you create a shared folder in DSM those shared folders will be part of this list here so all the shared folders will have an individual entry in this list from there you can enable them if you enable them the team folders will be accessible to users that have permission to that shared folder from inside of the Synology Drive client so the important thing to note there is one the user must have permission to it and two you'll be able to access it from the Synology Drive client so the versions are very important so if you think of a word file for example if you go through and make 10 different changes to it and you have 10 different saves you'll be able to go back and restore any of those versions from inside of Synology Drive in terms of the correct number of versions it's really up to you there's not necessarily a right or wrong answer but it might depend on the type of content that you're actually storing there so if you're storing documents you might want 30 versions but if you're storing video files you might not need that many so from a version perspective each team folder or the my drive folder can have different version settings as soon as you enable those theme folders you'll be able to go inside of the Synology Drive web client and you'll be able to see all of them from the web client right away however the power really exists when you can sync those files from a Synology Drive client either on Windows or Mac OS and you'll be able to set up different folders that will sync from your Nas to folders on your device and that's what we're going to take a look at now is the Synology Drive client setup so I want to be clear that if you don't want to set up the Synology Drive client you don't have to you can access it through a web browser you can go through and view all of your files from a web browser and it'll all function as expected however the Synology Drive client works very well there's some pretty Advanced functionality with it and that's what we're going to take a look at now so from a setup perspective I'm going to assume that you went through and downloaded and installed the actual client and as soon as you launch it you're going to have to connect to your Nas all that really involves is going through entering in the IP address and entering in a user account and as soon as you do that you'll be brought to the sync task settings now it's important to note that the user account that you log in as will be the user account that this actual client connects with so if you have a specific team folder that you want to access you have to make sure that the user account you're logging in as has permission to the shared folder so the next section is going to bring you to two different options you're going to have a sync task option and you're going to have a backup option we'll take a look quickly at the backup option later but we're going to look and focus on the sync task at this point so the sync task the way that it works is it will sync a folder on your local device to a folder on your Synology Nas now we're looking at this from a Windows client perspective the Mac OS client is slightly different and in the written instructions I have exactly how the Mac OS client works because we're going to be focusing in a second here on on-demand sync and the on-demand sync process on Mac OS is different than it is on windows so so just keep that in mind but overall for the most part the idea is the same so the top section is going to be the folder on your Nas that you want to sync with a folder on your device so that's either going to be the my drive folder or it's going to be a team folder you have to go through and you have to select one or the other the folder location on your computer is going to be the folder that you want to sync on this individual device so as soon as you set this up the folder on your local device that you select here will basically be a mirror of everything on your Nas anytime something changes on your Nas it will automatically sync down to your device or anytime anything changes on your device it will automatically sync up to your nest now right underneath that inside of Windows is on demand sync now for the majority of people you want to use this there are unique cases where you don't but after you see how on demand sync works you can make the decision for yourself on-demand sync allows you to go through and keep files on your Nas but have a link to them on your individual device so let's assume that you have a video file on your Nas and it's I don't know 10 gigabytes and you don't really use that very frequently you don't view it but you'd like to be able to store it in an individual folder and access it if you need to on-demand sync allows you to basically keep a reference to it on your device and when you double click it it will automatically download from your Nas to your local device it works both ways meaning that if the file exists on your local device and you'd rather not store it on your local device because you don't want to consume the space you can free up the local space and it will automatically sync to your Nas and at that point you can then always download it at a later time on demand sync is huge because it allows you to really have and access all of the files on your Nas while not actually consuming any of the storage space that it needs this allows you to go through and keep what you're currently working on on your local device and everything else can stay on your nest there is some Advanced functionality with on-demand sync like pinning copy so if you did want to keep an individual file on your device at all times and anytime it changes automatically download those changes you can pin a local copy and that'll basically function the way that Synology Drive functions without on-demand sync so you'll always have an updated copy on your local device you can make the decision on if you want to use on-demand sync or if you don't based on the data that you're actually going to be syncing there is some Advanced functionality that you can access by selecting the advanced Tab and you can go through and determine what type of syncing you want so if you only want to upload your changes or you only want to download changes from the nas you can set it up that way but two-way sync is probably what most people are going to use now one thing I want to quickly point out is that when you're selecting a folder on your local device there's an option to create an empty Synology drive folder you either want to enable that or you want to disable it but the functionality will greatly defer based on which option you select so for example if you're syncing all of your documents let's say your windows documents folder with your Synology Nas and you want your documents folder to be in sync with the my drive on your Nas you want to uncheck this option if you keep the option checked what it does is it creates a Synology drive folder inside of that documents folder and at that point only the contents of that Synology drive folder will then sync with your Nas so that's a very important option that you have to really think through on how you want to actually utilize this so after you complete this setup at that point the sync task will exist so what that means is like I said earlier your Synology Nas is really going to be the central location of all of your files anytime you change anything on this individual device inside of that folder it will automatically sync up to your Nas it'll be accessible from the web client it'll be accessible from your phone if you're using the Android or the iOS application and it'll be accessible on any other devices that you're using as well now you just set up your first sync task but it's important to remember that you can create multiple sync tasks so what I mean by that is if you have an individual my drive sync task you can go through and set up team folders as well or if you set up one team folder you can set up multiple team folders you really have to determine what folders you want to sync on your Nas with your PC so now that we set up our sync tasks we'll quickly look at a backup task but I want to be clear that a backup task in Synology Drive will function the exact same way as a sync task functions it's just that it's going to sync your entire C drive or for Mac it's going to sync your entire device now the reason I keep saying sync is because it's syncing the files it is not a true backup a sync is not necessarily a backup the reason I say it's not really a backup is because you have to utilize other tools to get backup functionality so for example if you're syncing your entire drive to your Synology Nas you really should probably set up snapshots and you'll probably want to set up backups as well so at that point you'll have a full Suite of tools where you can go through and you can actually restore an entire folder in case you're hit with something like a ransomware attack because a sync job will go through and sync anything so if you're hit with a ransomware attack an entire folder is encrypted for example those encrypted files will sync to your Nas so the latest version on your Nas is going to be that encrypted version now I don't personally use the backup feature inside of Synology drive but that doesn't mean that you can there are three different options that you could select if you decide to use this you can do a continuous backup you can do a manual backup or you can do a scheduled backup and overall they function similarly it just really means that the data will sync based on whatever you specify but the idea is the same you'll be able to go through and you'll be able to automatically sync all of your files from your device to your Nas so that's the server setup and that's the client setup we're quickly going to take a look at some Advanced features and I'm using that term very Loosely these aren't necessarily Advanced features but there's some cool things that you can use as soon as you implement Synology Drive the first thing that we're going to take a look at is versions so as we discussed earlier every single time you save a file you'll actually have a version of that file so if you have to go back and restore one of the previous versions you can either do that from inside of the Synology Drive web client or you can do it from inside of the actual Windows or Mac OS client as well the process is slightly different but the idea is the same you'll be able to go back to a previous version and restore it the second thing is file sharing now if you're using something like Synology Quick Connect you'll actually get a link that anybody in the world can access if you send them that link now if you're not using Synology Quick Connect you'll have to go through and use an alternative option we're going to look in a later video at different ways that you can access your Nas remotely but for the most part you probably shouldn't configure port forwarding that's for a different video so I wouldn't necessarily recommend that but people have used reverse proxies and they've been successful with that so the choice is really yours but Synology Quick Connect is probably going to be the easiest if you don't want to use Synology quick connect and you're only looking to share files internally meaning on your local network you can just grab a link to any individual file and send it to somebody else on your local network and they'll be able to access it there so now that we looked at most of what Synology drive has to offer I'm going to tell you why I prefer it over other options prior to Synology Drive I use Google Drive and Google Drive worked well but I didn't really use it mostly because of the costs associated with it I didn't want to go through I think I had it was like 15 gigabytes or something and for the most part I couldn't sync my entire documents folder with Google Drive so what it really was used for was anytime I was working on a file that I wanted to be able to access outside of my local network I would say get with Google drive it worked well however I quickly hit the data cap and as soon as I hit the data cap I realized I either have to pay to get more data storage or I have to kind of stop using this so I stopped using it then years later I started using Synology drive and it was for my specific workflow way better than Google Drive ever was what it allowed me to do is it allowed me to sync my documents folder up to my Nas on my drive and then on every single device I had my laptop my phone everything I was able to access my files at all times when I got a new device rather than copying the files from my old device to my new device I signed in with my Synology Drive client and then I was able to sync them all automatically that piece right there is really the highest praise that I can give Synology drive as soon as I get a new device all I do is sign in with my new user account and all of my files will exist on my local device that while it's seems small is huge because in the past I always had to pick and choose which specific documents I needed to send over and which were kind of older files that I didn't really need but at this point I just log in and all the files will automatically get synced now the second reason is privacy now I'm not one that's you know storing these super private documents however it is important to know that when you're using Synology Drive privacy is a top reason that a lot of people use it you store the file on your local device it automatically syncs to your Nas but everything is kept local it never has to leave your local network if you don't want it to so price and privacy are two of the biggest reasons however there's a third reason and this is more of a personal reason overall it just really works well for my specific workflow there are team folders that I set up that I'm not actually sharing with anybody else it's not like I have a team that I'm working with but what it allows me to do is it allows me to set up a shared folder on my Nas it allows me to to actually configure it as a team folder and then on that device I can go through and I can sync it to a different folder on whatever device I'm using so for example these YouTube videos as soon as I went through and set everything up I set up a new shared folder which then allowed me to create it as a team folder which then allowed me to sync it to my device and now all of these video files that I'm working on are automatically synced to my PC that you see behind me and to my laptop from a workflow perspective I can work on either device and all of my files will be up to date and if I change any of them on either device it'll automatically sync to the other the final reason is backups now I'm pretty crazy with backups I get it from my dad but the reality is by using Synology drive it allows me to automate my backup process in the next video we're going to take a look at my exact backup process so if you want to see that be sure to subscribe but the idea is that I can automatically back up these files without really having to do anything else it also allows me to utilize different snapshot schedules so for example I might want to take snapshots more or less frequently for a specific team folder than I do for my documents folder all of these are the reasons why I've picked Synology drive over Google Drive OneDrive Dropbox any of the other tools that we discussed in this video overall it just works very well for my specific workflow and it allows me to keep my Nas at the core which is really what I'm looking for so if you've made it this far thank you for watching if you have any questions leave them in the comments if not I will see you next time

Channel: WunderTech

Views: 23,398

Keywords: Synology Drive, Synology Drive Server, Synology Drive Client, Synology Drive Setup, Synology Drive vs. Google Drive

Id: 5WNVc33GOPU

Length: 18min 9sec (1089 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 13 2023