Sync Files To and From a Synology NAS using Synology Drive Server! (Tutorial)

hey everyone today we're going to take a look at the synology drive server now synology drive allows you to sync local files to your nas automatically this is one of my favorite tools because it allows me to automatically backup all of the files that i have in my documents folder to my nas which then gets backed up to the cloud so i'm basically ensuring that all of my data is safe at all times one of the other great features that i love is as soon as i get a new device all i have to do is install the synology drive client on that device log in and it will automatically download all of my files to that device so i'm not really tying my documents to local pcs at this point i am tying them to my synology nas and all i have to do is sign into the synology drive client and it will automatically download all of those files and it will keep them in sync so i basically have all of my documents in sync at all times across all of my devices so we're going to take a look at the synology drive server and then we're going to take a quick look at the synology drive client before we get started i just want to mention that for everything we're doing today i have full written instructions in the description of the video so the first thing that we have to do is we have to install the synology drive server so open up the package center then install the synology drive server application there will also be a few dependencies that you have to install so make sure you install those when it's done installing you're going to have to refresh the page and at that point synology drive is installed so you can open it up and we're going to quickly take a look inside of the synology drive server so most of the changes that you make are going to be done in the team folder section so the first thing we're going to look at is the my drive folder now this basically allows you to enable a my drive section for all of your users so this allows your users to automatically have their own folder on their nas where their individual files will be backed up too so if you think of this in the context of a family your entire family would have their own individual folders and then there will be folders where they can share documents as well but we're going to get to that in a little bit so if you enable the my drive team folder it's going to prompt you and let you know that you have to enable the user home and like i said a little earlier this just gives a folder for every single one of your users so every user on your nas will get their own individual folder and that's where their files will sync to you have to enable this so select yes and then you're going to scroll all the way down to the bottom and you're going to enable user home since you're going to be using this for documents i suggest that you enable the recycle bin as well this basically just says that if a file gets deleted from your nas it will go into the recycle bin and you can restore it if you need to after that you can go back to the synology drive admin console and it's going to prompt you for the version history that you'd like so this is basically just stating that every document every time you save it it will save a new version since the majority of the time you're going to be using synology drive for documents it's a good idea to keep version control on and then the maximum version is totally personal preference whatever you'd prefer generally i keep it at 30 versions and it just states that every single time i save a file it will sync to my nas and that version history will save the most recent 30 versions after that you're going to be informed that read only privileges so users that have read only privilege will only be able to sync files from the nas so they won't be able to sync files to the nas because you'll need edit permission for that but they'll be able to sync files from the nest so we're going to get to that in a little bit so now that my drive is set up we're going to look at the other team folders so every shared folder that you have on your nas will be in this list and basically it allows you to sync that folder across multiple different users so if you think of mydrive you have access to that folder meaning the user account that is currently signed in has access to that folder and no other users do a team folder is the opposite of that so a team folder can be synced across multiple users so if you have one folder that you want to sync across multiple users you would use a team folder and a little later we're going to get into the client portion of this but when you set up the synology drive client application it will allow you to sync these folders as well so keep in mind my drive is your individual files team folders are files that multiple people can collaborate on after you enable this you'll have to set up versioning on this folder as well so as far as the server goes that's the main setup so you're basically setting up the folders that you want people to have access to but now you have to set up the synology drive client so the client is what you install on the client device and it will automatically connect back to your synology nas so in a little bit we'll get into how it works but for now we're just going to look at installing it so the easiest way that i've found to install it is by opening up the synology drive application on your nas and in the bottom right you're going to see it says get synology drive apps now after you click that you'll see two buttons one will be for pc and one will be for mobile so if you want to install the application on your mobile phone it will have a qr code that you can scan but basically just go to the google play store go to the apple app store and download the synology drive client if you click for pc what it's going to do is it's going to download the latest version for your device so there are three different versions there's one for mac there's one for pc and there's one for linux based on whatever operating system you're on it will automatically download the correct version now if you want to skip all of this synology has the installation files for every operating system on their website but in the written instructions i have a link as well so now that we download and install the synology drive client we're going to go ahead and we're going to configure it so if you launch that application you're going to have to select start now and you're going to be brought to two options one that says sync task and one that says backup task for now we're strictly going to look at sync task and we're going to look at the backup task a little later so select sync task and then you're going to have to put the ip address of your synology nas and you're going to have to put your user account and the password check off the enable ssl data transmission encryption and you can click next you're going to be prompted informing you that your synology nas certificate is not trusted that's fine you can proceed through that so the top section is the folder that you want to sync from your synology nas so if you want to sync a team folder only you'd have to go in and you'd have to select that team folder if you're using just the my drive meaning that the drive that's connected to your user account on your nas then you would select the uh the my drive button there but you could just leave it as default because it will do the same thing now the bottom folder is slightly different so for the bottom folder what you have to do is you have to connect it to the folder on your local device that you want it to sync to so for my drive what i normally do is i connect it to my documents folder and it's just because i want to sync all of my personal documents up to my my drive folder realistically you can select any folder that you'd like it doesn't have to be your documents folder but the one thing i want to highlight is the check box that says create an empty synology drive folder if you leave that enabled meaning if you leave it checked off it will create a synology drive folder inside of the folder that you selected and sync all of your files to that folder so basically if you wanted to sync to the root directory that you selected uncheck that option if you wanted to create a synology drive folder inside of the folder that you selected you can leave it enabled so you can go through the advanced settings as you'd like but the one thing i want to point out is the sync mode so as long as your user account has the correct permissions you have two different ways that you could sync you have a two-way sync and you can download data from the synology drive server only so basically this means that if you have two-way sync on any of the changes that you make locally will automatically sync to your nas if you use the other option which is download data from synology drive server only this will download the changes from your nas only so basically anything that changes on your nest will automatically sync to that client device but it's not going to upload any of the changes that you make on your device now keep in mind you're only creating one connection here so if you have team folders you have to go in at a later time and you have to create another connection to that team folder so in the written instructions i have exactly how you can do that but the principles that i'm showing you here are pretty much the same you have to go in you have to select the team folder that you want to connect to and you have to select the local folder that you want to sync it to that will always be standard after that you can proceed and the next step is going to ask you if you want to configure a location for a sync folder and this is basically just a way that you can share files between multiple users on your nas you can set this up if you want it basically just creates another folder on your local device but if you want you can set it up later as well so after you do that it will be fully set up so basically the folder that you connected to will automatically download all of the files that are stored on that nas and it will sync them to your local pc if you have two-way sync enabled any of the changes that you make will automatically then sync from your client device to your nas so basically you're ensuring that the files on your nas and the files on your client pc are always up to date now one of my favorite features on windows in specific i can't comment if it works on mac and linux it might but i've only tested it on windows is the ability to free up space on your local device and store your documents in the cloud only and by cloud i mean your nas so since the files are stored on your nas the windows operating system is intelligent enough to leave a link for that in the folder itself so basically when you double click it it will go ahead and it will download that file from your nas the reason this is important is because you don't have to store the physical file on your pc you can choose to and for certain files you can choose to keep them on your pc at all times and basically anytime the file changes on your nas it will automatically sync to your device but you don't have to do it that way you can leave them on your nas and when you double click them it will automatically download the latest version from your nas and it's basically reclaiming space on your client pc it allows you to access those files at all times and it just kind of works you don't really have to think about it so the next thing we're going to take a look at is how to configure a backup task so the huge disclaimer here is that this is not a bare metal backup so a bare metal backup for people that don't know is a way that you could take the operating system the files everything in its current state and restore it on a different pc so this is not a bare metal backup this is strictly a document backup so to configure it you can open up the synology drive client application and you can go to settings and then you can select backup task and you can create a new backup task now since we automatically connected to our nas last time you can use the connection that already exists but if you want to connect to a different nas for whatever reason you can do so here as well so you now have to select the backup source so this is the data that you want to back up from your client device to your nas since this isn't a bare metal backup backing up the operating system files it's probably not necessary there's nothing that you're really going to get from there if you run into any major problems you'd probably have to reinstall the operating system so you're really just looking to back up your personal folder so for a lot of people that would probably just be their user accounts folder now if you store a lot of files outside of your user account folder you might want to back up that folder as well this is totally up to you just select all of the files that you want to back up to your nas you can also modify the backup rules if you want to filter any of the files that automatically get backed up the next thing that you have to do is you have to set up a backup mode so you have three options you have continuous backup manual backup and scheduled backup continuous backup will basically just upload the file as soon as it changes manual backup you have to go out of your way to select backup now and scheduled backup will back up the the device on a schedule so daily weekly monthly you know whatever you want after that's done you can select done and the backup job will be properly configured so like i said a little earlier this is one of my favorite applications because it allows me to ensure that all of my important files are backed up to my nas at all times so i have my pc i have a laptop and i have a few virtual machines that i connect to when i'm outside of my house and basically all of my documents are always synced across all of those devices at all times i also have the mobile application for this so i can pull up any of my documents at any time so something that i want to point out is just because we're using the client tools does not mean that you can't access this from a web browser so you don't have to install the client application if you don't want to everything will be accessible through the web browser so you're able to go through and navigate all your files think of this like a cloud storage solution so if you use onedrive or if you use google drive for example this is pretty much your own cloud so you manage everything you determine who has access to it if you want to access it from outside of your network you probably should do that using a vpn if you don't have a vpn setup i will leave a pop-up for that now that will show you how to set up openvpn on your synology nas but i just really want to highlight that just because i went over how to sync files to your local device by using the synology drive client you don't have to do that you can do everything through the web browser you can do everything through your mobile phone if you want the choice is totally yours so as always thank you for watching the video if you guys have any questions please leave them in the comments if you liked the video give it a thumbs up and please consider subscribing to the channel thanks guys

Channel: WunderTech

Views: 120,843

Keywords: synology drive server, synology drive client, synology nas cloud, own cloud synology nas

Id: lohOzoFbPf0

Length: 13min 36sec (816 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 14 2021