How to Setup a Synology NAS for the first time in DSM 7 (Complete Guide for 2021+)

all right how's it going y'all today we're going to be going over how to set up a synology nas for the very first time for complete beginners and this is going to be in dsm-7 so we're going to be setting up in dsm-7 which has just come out this is 2022 in september and so we want to make sure that we're going to start off with dsm-7 which means you won't have to upgrade later on and that way you really will reduce your chance of errors and this is going to be a video for complete beginners who have no idea what the nas is and really just get you set up with a pretty basic setup that is secured and also has some redundancy in case something terrible happens and you lose files or you get a crypto attack because one of the computers on your network got hacked and so in this video i'm not actually going to be really recommending specific nas units i'll leave a few in the description below but what i would pretty much recommend is if you're using this for anything more than a file server and even if you're just using it for a file server if you can manage it i would recommend getting a plus unit that is a unit that will have btrfs and some really great features which will allow you to use all the features of a synology nas and they're about maybe 100 bucks more expensive a lot of time and personally i believe it brings out a ton of usability in them so i would highly recommend getting a plus unit but i'll leave a link to a few recommendations in the description below another big recommendation is what hard drives use personally i use seagate iron wolves but it's totally up to you just make sure you do not buy the basic wd reds because those are smart drives so whenever you're picking out your drives just make sure whatever they are are called cmr derives and not smr drives but other than that i would just recommend getting some nas drives so this right here is a synology 7 18 plus that we're going to be setting up totally for the first time right here and it's actually really easy to go ahead and get started really the three things you're going to need for this tutorial are one obviously synology two some hard drives and three a network cable that you can plug into your router because these do not support wi-fi you're going to plug them directly into your router alright so once you've got those things the first thing you need to do is go ahead and put your hard drives in it's pretty easy but i'll go ahead and show it just pop out the tray like that pull out this thing snap off the sides [Music] and just slot in the drive make sure the metal bits are facing outward it really only goes in one way though and you'll see the rubber grommets line up and then once the they're lined up with the screw holes you just put it in and that's it now let's go ahead and put in so now we're just going to slot it in here and there we go i would also recommend setting this up with a raid with redundancy so for this tutorial we're really going to be talking about shr-1 or raid five which are pretty much equivalent so i would really recommend buying an extra hard drive so if you've got a two bay basically plan on using one bay of storage total so you've got two eight terabyte drives and a two bay like right here you'll end up with only eight terabytes of usable storage so that is one thing i would recommend because that does allow your hard drive to fail and you keep all of your data and so if you've got a four bay you'll just lose one drive of redundancy so you'll have three drives of data so you have four eight terabyte drives that will be 24 terabytes of storage and so now that we've set that up all we have to do is go ahead and plug it into our network and plug it in so i'm going to do that now all right so now i've just gone ahead and plugged the drives in and also turn it on and i hit the power button and so now you can see the blinking light it's booting up and so the first thing we're going to go ahead and do is find the thing so we're going to go to find.synology.com and it's actually not going to find it quite yet because we've not heard the beep yet you need to listen for the beep the beat basically means hey yes i've booted up and we're good to go so find.synology.com is a great app because it really just goes through on your web browser and scans your entire network and says okay these are all the synologies so you can see right here i've got two synologies up and running but neither one of these are the ones we actually want to use so we're just going to go ahead and wait for the beep and then we'll know okay now we can go ahead and refresh the webpage all right and there was the beep so now we're gonna go ahead and just refresh the page and we can see it found it right here and the status should be not installed so now we're just going to go ahead and click connect agree to the eula yada yada yada all right and so now we're ready to go ahead and install it and so now the sm7 is totally out it should just go ahead and automatically install dsm-7 but if for whatever reason it doesn't it installs dsm-6 you can go through and manually select the file and do it here but it should just go through and install dsm-7 for you so that'll be easy just go ahead and click next and now it's really just going to do its own thing and install it for us and so with dsm 7 setting up the synology to ask has gotten really easy honestly they really walk you through everything a lot better but we're also going to go through a few specific settings and while it's downloading installing i'll just kind of talk about those now so the first thing we're going to go ahead and do is we're actually going to set up a admin account that is going to be separate from our regular user account this admin account we're only going to log in whenever we need to do administrative things this is like changing people's permissions changing network ports anything like that we're only going to touch when we need to be an admin and so we're only going to log in when we're an admin on that i know that's a bit confusing and a bit annoying because you'll have to switch back and forth between accounts but in reality very rarely should you ever actually have to log in with the admin account once everything is set up and running and so the reason we're doing this is really security by not ever really using your admin account it is a lot less likely that it will ever get compromised and so that way whenever you're being a regular user you are a regular user and it's so much easier to do and so that way when you normally log in and doing normal user things you're just a user and so should anything happen and you never know what can happen and somebody gets access to your user account they won't have admin privileges if they don't have admin privileges they can't really destroy the entire thing which is an awesome thing and that's why we're really going to focus on doing that all right and so now it's going to go ahead and just restart our dsm and oh look at these pretty graphics now it's going to do a little countdown for us apparently and so it's going to go ahead and do it now the other thing we're also going to set up is we're going to set up btrfs snapshots and this is actually just going to be for people who have a btrfs nas which is pretty much every single plus model and a few of the regular models and so it is an awesome feature and i think at this point unless you're doing very specific things things such as having a ton and a ton of security cameras and that's all this nas is doing i think you should set up your nas to use btrfs if possible because it unlocks so many awesome features that synology dsm has to offer things like active backup for business things like virtual machine manager things like bt rfs snapshots all require btrfs and so i would really recommend setting up with btrfs but we're going to go over that in a minute here and so the reason we're setting up btrfs snapshots is it's actually kind of a safety net it's not a perfect backup and it is not a backup you really should look into backing up your crucial files but btrfs snapshots can protect us from a hostile computer on your network say a computer on your network gets a virus and has access to your synology share over smb well it can go through and encrypt that entire file system but with btrfs snapshots we'll actually be able to just roll back the clock and get all of our files back and the person who's encrypting the nas will have no way of stopping that as long as they don't have the admin account and so that's one of the real benefits of btr vs snapshots i've got a video on how to protect your nas and a few security videos i would highly recommend checking out and i'll leave all that in links in the description below but really we're going to set this up basically so you've got simple protection and it's going to be really easy to set up and go all right and so now that that second beep has happened it means the nasa has booted up again anytime you hear a beep it means it's either booting up or shutting down and we can see that it is installing the built-in packages all right and perfect it's already gone through and installed dsm-7 for us so now we just got to go ahead and hit start all right so device name this is what you're going to use to connect to every single time so i'm going to go ahead and call it spacex you could also call it something like blank nas but i would recommend just having lowercase letters and no special characters it'll just make everything a lot easier and now administrator counts remember as i said earlier we're actually going to have a separate administrator account then our regular user account and the way i like people do this and i really recommend you do it too is my name is will so i'm going to call it will admin and that way we know hey this is the regular will account and this is the admin account and i'll come up with a password and i'm just going to make something up here because well it's for video and especially if you're going to be opening this up to the internet with something like quick connect you're really going to want to have a strong password on everything he says as he puts a weak password but i promise i'm formatting this thing all right and so now we have an option for how we want to do automatic updates for dsm and i think that this is probably what you want to do automatically install important dsm packages and updates only so what this will do is it will not push an update automatically to your nas unless it's deemed important and important you should read as a security update or a very major bug update or anything like that that is crucial and so this way in the very unlikely chance that they push out an app that has poor compatibility or has some bug in it it won't be automatically installed and if there is a security update which you really want to make sure to get it will be installed automatically so that's definitely what i would recommend setting up but if you want to try always the latest and greatest you can install the latest dsm packages and updates and if you're very very ocd and want to make sure you have total control of your nas it'll notify you but it will not install anything automatically but for most people i really recommend important dsm updates and so now you have the option to use what's called quick connect and basically integrate your synology account into this and this really has three big features it's quick connect and quick connect is a very basic and actually quite secure way to connect your nas from anywhere in the world if you don't plan on needing access to your nas outside of your home's network i would not recommend enabling quick connect because it's just another thing of failure but one of the great uses for nas is the ability to grab files from anywhere and personally i actually use quick connect because i found it's awesome and it works really well but if you're going to want external access i would recommend really sticking to quick connect especially if you're a beginner because it makes everything a lot easier and it won't just open up a port that's really bad just let quick connect handle it until you learn more and so that way you're a lot more protected and so by signing in here you don't automatically sign up for quick connect but it will allow you to do things like active insight which allows you to get metrics and things like that so it's up to you and so actually i'm just going to go ahead and sign in with it now so the screen's going to get blurry and so right here is where you have the option to set up quick connect so what quick connect allows you to do is at its base it allows you to very easily connect to your nas outside of your home's network it's all very easy and it sets up ssl for you and it kind of does everything for you and so if you really want external access to your nas this is a very secure way of doing it and i personally use it and so if you'd like that you can go ahead and put a quick connect name in here and so whenever you need to connect you'll just go blank.quickconnect.2 and it will automatically connect from wherever you are in the world as long as your nas is online and so i'm just going to go ahead and skip that for now but it's a great thing it makes it really easy to manage and so now we've got a couple of options here you can enable active insight that's pretty much where metrics are sent to sunlight's active insight server i'm pretty sure they are monitoring this as well but it does allow you to see really great metrics on what's going on with your nas and so if you want that feature and don't really care if synology has how many files you're transferring per second and things like that you can enable it but if you never use it you can obviously disable it and then a really nice thing is the dsm configuration backup it will back up all of your dsm settings to the cloud and so it makes it really easy to do a restore this will not back up any files but it will back up your settings so i'm going to go ahead and enable both of those all right and so now we need to go ahead and create a storage pool and a volume to most people a storage pool and volume are very similar things but it's the difference between a block of data and how your computer sees the data so a storage pool is a block of data basically how your hard drives all get added together generally in a raid configuration so when you're talking about storage pool you're talking about rage you're talking about jvod you're talking about shr when you're talking about a volume you're talking about a file system and so it's either ext4 or btrfs you don't really need to know too much here what i would recommend you set up shr-1 for your storage pool and for your volume btrfs if you've got it so this is kind of showing it here and so it's just going to have us do the entire thing here so here's where we get to select our raid type and i have two drives in here so i have a few options i have shr-1 raid 1 and so in this case shr 1 and raid 1 are going to be the same both will basically be a mirror of the same disk and so if one of the drives fails we'll still have all of our data and can keep going basic is where you've got one drive and it's just like you plug it into your windows machine there's a one drive it shows up there there's no fault tolerance if the drive fails it fails and you lose all of that data jbod pretty much allows you to have multiple disks all added together to the same storage volume and so it's kind of like basic but with multiple disks and then rate zero i would actually not really recommend unless you need a ton of performance and that's why you're having it because it gives you less storage flexibility than jbod and if one disk fails you lose everything with jbod one disk fails you only lose the data on that disk but don't really count on that and so between raid 0 and jbod i would actually go jbod for most people but the real question you need to ask yourself is do i want protection in the form of hard drives so what this allows you to do is shr 1 and raid 1 will give you the ability for one hard drive to fail and still have all of your data by the way if you're doing this on a 4 bay model instead of raid 1 you'll want to do what's called raid 5 but i would actually just stick with shr if you want one drive of fault tolerance stick with shr if you say you know what i've got good backups if a drive fails and i'm out a few days while i'm waiting for a new drive to come in while i'm waiting for things to rebuild that's okay but i'm going to go ahead and select shr and so we will lose one drive default tolerance all right and so now we'll see that we need to select our drives to create the pool of shr so we're going to select both of them and we're going to notice right here that the hard drive sizes are kind of off this is a five terabyte drive and this is a three terabyte drive and so you'll notice they're both off by exactly ten percent well about ten percent and so it's actually the right size it's the size that is on the package it's just two ways of measuring the exact same data so a tear it byte says that there is 1024 gig it bytes in a tear it byte which is the way you count everything up in binary but a terr uh byte is 1 000 gig bytes and so that's the difference it's the difference between using a binary where you're using 1024 for each base versus using a standard 1000 version and so it's cascaded down and so there's a 10 difference when we're talking about terabytes and so don't worry about that it'll be the exact same size you think it is but that's just one thing people are always confused by you will lose a little bit of space due to synology dsm as well it might say they're not on the product compatibility list but you've already bought the drives i do recommend looking at the product compatibility list especially if you're going to be working as a business it'll just make dealing with synology a lot easier and now you've got two options here you can either do the disk check and i would really recommend that it'll go through and figure out if there's anything weird going on with the drives or you can skip it but if you're setting this up for the first time i would really recommend doing that it will be a little bit slower for the first two days probably but it's well worth it because you're going to have these drives for a long time you may as well do this and so now i would really just recommend setting the size to the maximum and go ahead and click next so now you've got the two options so before we were talking about that storage pool that's how the data is presented to the synology and now we are talking about the file system aka the volume so we're going to set this up as btrfs if you've got btrfs the j models only have the ability to do ext4 but i would really recommend if you have the option to do btrfs do be trfs unless you're on a very specific edge case and doing something like a ton of database transactions or if you're running a ton of security cameras and your primary goal is security cameras otherwise btrfs is just going to be so much better and i would really recommend it all right and now we just go ahead and click apply everything will be erased we know okay and so now the volume is set up for us and it's going to go through and it's just checking those drives to see if there's anything weird going on and so this will help figure out if your drives are dead on arrival as well and so what i would recommend is for the first week and if you're cautious maybe even two weeks when you get the drives the very first time keep a backup don't copy everything over and then just immediately delete it because if a drive is going to fail it's generally either going to fail in the first two weeks or it's not going to fail for a few years that's just how hard drives work it's got a reverse bell curve so you've got a high chance of dying right at the beginning and then after that it's going to last for a very long time most likely and so i would also recommend really setting up backups but just be very cautious for the first two weeks because if your drive is going to fail early it's going to fail in the first two weeks and so now we can start setting some things up and some configurations i like to do we're not going to go super in depth on this this is all stuff that's just going to run automatically and it's going to make your life easier so the very first thing we're going to go ahead and do is schedule data scrubbing if you've got a btrfs volume and so i would recommend scrubbing the pool every three months and if you're using this for an office or something and you need great performance during work days you can even select when to run it so say okay let's pause it during the weekday and have only run on the weekends honestly it doesn't really decrease performance that much but it's good you've got that option and so this will go through and it will use btrfs's cool features to figure out if there is any silent data corruption and fix it btrfs can fix data from one error so say one bit on a hard drive flips btrfs will automatically be able to fix it and it will do so during this period meaning that it's very unlikely that in that three month period two different bits have flipped in the same data set and so i always recommend scheduling this just because it'll figure out when things are going wrong and just figure it out for you even if you've got an ssd volume you should do this because it's only a read unless there's something wrong then it's a write and so just set that up you'll never think about it again and so if you are going to be setting up an ssd cache and i've got another video that kind of goes over all that you can do that here with create ssd cache personally i would only recommend it if they're going to be nvme drives because they're so much more performant and so you can do that there some synologies have two slots for nvme drives and it's awesome and so now that's done here so we're going to go ahead and close out of it and now we're going to install a couple of packages agree to eula and the really important one that we want to go ahead and do is we're going to want to one do x fat because in dsm 7 it's free we're also going to want to go ahead and install synology snapshot replication right here and so synology snapshot replication you only need to install if you've got a btrfs volume because if you don't have a btr of s volume you probably won't even see it there and you can't get any use out of it the other thing i would highly recommend looking at is a backup solution so hyper backup hyper backup's awesome you really should be looking into setting up hyper backup to backup those crucial files in your life another good package to look at is active backup for business once again only if you have an btrfs volume because active backup for business allows you to backup windows pcs and a lot of other stuff all to your synology all in a really great format okay and so now that we've installed those two things we can go ahead and create our very first volume so the way we're going to do that is we're going to go into control panel shared folder and we are going to now create a shared folder so shared folder is pretty much what's going to be exposed to your computer what i would recommend doing for most people is try to limit the number of shared folders if possible say you've got two different use cases you want to be able to store business files and personal files then create two different shared folders for that one for each business personal so for business users the way you kind of want to set up shared folders if possible and don't do this if you're going to have more than six shared folders probably is you want to kind of set up logical groups for all the users and so say you've got data that's financial that you only want specific groups to have access to create a different shared folder for each of those as long as it's under probably five or six then if you've got more than that and you've got a lot of custom use cases for a lot of different things you're going to want to use advanced share folder permissions but i'm not going to go over that in this tutorial because it's way out of the scope of this and so let's just say we're a regular family user and we're just going to have one shared folder we're going to go ahead and just click create and we're going to create shared folder and we'll just call it family and so we're going to go ahead and set up make sure it's on the volume one you probably only have one volume though and then now you can choose to encrypt or not encrypt means if somebody walks off with your hard drives can they be able to read this or not i'm going to say no for this then the other thing i would really recommend setting up is the advanced checksum if you've got the btrfs volume it will be a little bit slower but it will protect your data so much better and by slower you're probably never going to see it and so now we are not going to set up the permissions just yet because the only account is the admin account and we do not want that by the way do not enable this admin account right here it's a security risk okay perfect now it is set up and so now we can go through and open up file station and we can see that that folder exists with a recycling bin the thing you're probably going to want to do is set up a recycling bin empty task so to do that go ahead and say task scheduler create schedule task recycling bin we'll call it empty recycling and we're going to schedule it so we'll have it run every single day at midnight and we'll say empty all the recycling bins or you can say a very specific recycling bin empty and then you can say okay delete all the files that are older than seven days so what this means is every day any files ordered in seven days will be deleted out of the recycling bin and so that way you have seven days to get a file back but since we're setting up these btr pet snapshots that i'm about to talk about in a minute here it will automatically do it you can go through and get really custom with it but that should be good for most users okay so now that is done we've got a shared folder and we've also got the recycling bin emptied and we've also set up some auto tasks now we need to go ahead and create ourselves a regular user so to do that go ahead and open up users and group so group settings are absolutely awesome for people who can use them so you should really think about having a regular family user group and you can do that right here so let's just say we're setting this up for our family and we'll do that now so we'll create a group called family so we're not going to add anybody to it because we don't have any family members created yet and obviously family we probably want to be able to have shared folder permissions to this family folder right here so anybody who's family will have access to the family shared folder and so that way automatically they would not also have access to say i had a personal shared folder or something like that they would not have access to it and you can set up a quota here so say you only want people to be able to add one terabyte of data each to it you can do that here we're not going to set that up and then the options they can have we don't need to set anything up here and we'll just click through okay so now we're going to go ahead and create a user and we're going to call them will for myself okay so once again we've got to have a good password on here another thing you can do and i'll show you how to in a minute is you can actually set up password protection rules to say people have to have this advance of passwords and what we're going to do is now will wants to be a member of the family and so now since he's at his family he will default have access to the family shared folder and any other headings we set up for that say we want to add everybody to synology photos we can just instead of adding every single person to it instead we can just say okay add the entire family group permission to it and so that's why it's really nice if you're going to have more than three or four users to really go through and set up groups if that logically makes sense and so now you can see because i'm part of family the group permission says okay he's got read write to it and then i could also overwrite that to say no access and so for a very specific user you can always say i know he technically has permission to it because he's in the group but we're actually not going to give it to him but we're not going to do that we're going to let the family control his entire permissions so if you don't have anything here it will automatically just go with whatever the group settings are all the same stuff we'll just click through and so this is my regular account now this is this will account is the account i'm going to sign in to finder with i'm going to use 95 of the time and so we could also keep creating more family members for all of our specific family members and just adding into that family group and so right now we're signed in with this will admin account and that's why we're able to control all these settings but whenever we're signing in to just do random things like access synology photos and everything like that we'll just use the regular user account will and so go ahead and do similar things for that the other thing is if you are opening this up to the internet i would really recommend making sure your family members have some strength rules in here so that way they can't have really weak passwords so what we can do is you can say okay it's got to be at least 10 characters and they can't have common passwords and they've got to have special characters in there and so that way you can easily set everybody up to create their own passwords the other thing is if you're setting up passwords for people and you want to give them a one-time password you can also say force password change after the administrator resets their password and so this way they have to come up with their own password after you give them one so that's another option finally we'll see down here enable user home service so if we do that and let's do that here this is pretty much a home folder for everybody that means everybody who signs in will have their own unique home folder and so they can put files in there that nobody else can see just saying you as the administrator will have full access to their home folder and i'll go ahead and show that right now and so since we're setting this up the first time all the users will have to change their passwords that next login or you can skip it so the reason you would do this is synology does not currently know how strong everybody's passwords are because it's hashed and so it can't say if people actually are following these rules so we can go through and not do this and we can skip it or you can do it it doesn't really matter for this case okay so now we can go through and we can see that under file station we'll have three different folders there's that family folder we set up already and then there's also this home and homes so the reason there's two of them is because we're an administrator still so if we open up the homes folder we'll see that every single user has a home folder and if we look at will admin we're actually in there so we'll just call this test so we'll see that the home folder is the same as the will admin homes folder so this is just because we're an administrator we can see everybody's home folders because we're administrator so people should know that don't use your power and so now you can put stuff in your own home folder and anytime you sign in you will get access to that home folder and so that way everybody can have their own little section of the nas to store their own files without clogging up the rest not having everybody else see it okay and so now that is all set up we've just got two more things to do we're going to set up some snapshots to protect yourself and then we're going to go ahead and get logged in so we're going to go ahead and open up main menu and we're going to open up snapshot replication so we're going to set up snapshots and this is part of that protection thing and this is only for people who have btrfs volumes so what we're going to set up and i have a much better in-depth video on this but what we're going to do is we're going to set up a snapshot schedule for these shared folders and it's going to allow us to have some protection so in the case where a computer on the network goes hostile and corrupts everybody's files or anything like that we'll be able to recover from that and that's really important for the cases where your nas gets cryptoed and so i'm not gonna go into this in depth here there's a link in the description for how to do this and i'll just go ahead and set up some basic stuff here we're pretty much just going to keep all snapshots for the past 28 days and so the only thing you really need to worry about here is from the moment you delete a file and delete the other recycling bin 2 you will not get the space back for 28 days and so that is the one thing that might be weird other than that you'll never notice these are running because it's very space efficient so if you do delete a ton of files you're like you know what i really need the space back now what you can do is you can easily go through and just delete the old snapshots once you're sure you have all the data you need and you'll immediately get that data back and so now we'll just go ahead and set that up you once again you're really not going to notice this but it could save you in the case where something bad happens and that's it so that is just nice to have your back pocket should any files get corrupt or anything you can go through and just click recovery and you'll be able to go through and look at the files since we've not had snapshot run yet it's not going to do it but i've got a video that goes over that in depth i'll leave in the link in the description below that's just a setting you'll never notice you've set it up until you need it all right so now we've got that set up we've got pretty much the entire nas set up and running so now let's go ahead and connect to it and so we can go through and the easiest way to connect to it is using what's called smb and this works with mac os linux it also works with windows and so it's pretty much the way you should be accessing all of your files on your nas and so the easiest way to connect to your nas is to just go ahead and open a new finder window and then if we go right here under network we should see the spacex folder right here and so we can double click on it and we'll say connect as and just go ahead and type it in and boom now we've got access to all those shared folders and we can even say test and it's just like it's a hard drive hooked up to our computer so now i just put that in the family folder and so now if we go into file station here we'll see boom they're synced and so everybody has access to these shared folders who you give permission to and so it's just going to be so easy to go through and set all this stuff up and that's really how you should be dragging dropping files to your nas it's all incredibly easy to use then if you need external access to your nas you're going to want to look at what's called synology drive and a lot of other features but really that's the basic setup for how to set up a synology nas now you've got snapshots enabled and you've pretty much got the basic configurations that i would really recommend for everybody alright well that's going to be it for this tutorial there is a ton going on with the synology nas and there's so many features you can use so go ahead and leave any other new tutorials you'd like to see me make in the comments below and i'll go ahead and put some really important videos for you to watch as well in the description below alright have a good one bye [Music] you

Channel: SpaceRex

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Length: 33min 54sec (2034 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 25 2021