Synology Home vs Homes Explained - New users most common mistake

the single most common mistake I see users make when I'm working with them on Consulting calls and I'm coming in CL cleaning up their Nas and fixing a couple things that have been set up wrong all revolves around one feature and that is the home/ homes folder and I do not know why sy's had trouble making this so clear I think it is a really tough thing that has happened there's a few things that make it really easy to make this mistake and so this video is going to be talking about what is the home/ homes folder and really going over how it can be useful and some key issues with it that you might not realize going forward so to explain what I'm talking about here I'm going to go ahead and mount my Nas over SMB so I'm going to go ahead and log in with an admin account this is the very first account you create is an admin account all right so we've connected onto the Nas and this is how you should be accessing files on your Nas 95% of a time over SMB anytime you're on the local network this is pretty much just a basic file server where the files are never stored on your computer and they're just stored on the nas it makes the nas into essentially an external hard drive whenever you're connect to network and you're going to see two folders here homes and home and this is really confusing this is a very common thing that people run into and get confused by because what is this homes folder doing here and what is it and because I'm an admin I will just come in here and I can add in whatever folders I want in there and start using it and now any other users can't really access files in here and it gets really confusing so this is the issue that a lot of people run into is starting to modify files in this homes folder and that is a big no no so I'm going to go ahead and delete this and we're going to talk about how the home folder works and how the homes folder relates to it so if we come into our Nas over here we can just do this all from file station and what we're able to do is if we look within the homes folder we are going to see a list of usernames and that is actually how this works and so to really simplify what the home and homes folder is is the home folder is a setup where every single user gets their own special part of the Nas and that's their home folder so I logged in with the account labeled will so I'm connected as will so if I open up my home folder via SMB and I say demo I will see that I can add a folder in the home folder now we're going to switch over here and we're going to look at us as an admin and so if I look at the homes folder and I look at Will's folder it's that so the way the homes folder works is it is actually just a collection of everybody's home folder so essentially every time you create create a new user they will get their own home folder so since I'm signed with will my folder labeled home connect as will is just Will's home folder and since the very first account you create within sonology is the admin account it has the ability to see everybody else's home folder within the hes folder that's another reason why when we go into control panel over here and shared folder we only see the homes folder we don't see a home folder because the home folder is not a shared folder it is just a virtual folder essentially what happens when I sign in with the account labeled will it shows me this virtual folder called home that just points to this folder right here and that is the basics of what the home versus homes folder is and this is where understanding it is really useful so a couple of things I do to make this process much simpler is I always come into control panel right here and I really disable the homes folder from being visible on the network because it causes a lot of weird stuff to happen when people try to modify it so I'll come in here and I will disable it from being shown in the network places and so now if I disconnect and reconnect as well we're just going to see a much simpler view of the world where we don't even just see that homes folder it's just going to simplify it out a lot better so now what this home folder is for you is every time you want to have your own personal section and stick your own files everybody can just put their own files in here and that's why it's really valuable to have every single person have their own account on the nas because then their home folder can be whatever stuff they want to put in there and it's really valuable because now instead of having to create a shared folder for every single person everybody gets their own little section of the nas in their home folder automatically created and it doesn't clog up your Nas with a bunch of Stu stuff one thing to note the administer anybody who is in the group administrators will be able to see the contents of anybody else's home folder that's just how Linux Works any privileges that you would take away from this home folder to make it so you can't see it you can also just undo anybody who's in the administrator group has basically full access to do anything so they will be able to see anybody's files in their home folder and that's what's the homes folder hope hopefully that makes sense it's a really confusing concept but it can also have a lot of value because everybody can get their own section I'm going to show how all these apps work with the home folder in a minute here but I also do want to quickly talk about some of the downsides to using the home folder so if you use the home folder you cannot share files with anybody else from there you really should only be putting stuff in the home folder that is truly stuff that only you want to see it's great have having your own little scratch space but it's not going to be accessible by anybody else except for an administrator the home folder really should just be reserved for own scratch space phone backups stuff like that that you just want clogging up any other space on the Nas and that is really what you should focus on you don't want to put stuff in the home folder that you want other people to see unless you're using sonology drive only but we'll talk about that later here so that is one downside of using the home folder and especially if if you've got the setup where your homes folder you started putting files in here and folders in here that is where really weird stuff can happen and you really do not want to do that try to clean that up as soon as possible because you're going to run into these very odd scenarios I would recommend moving all that stuff out of there into a shared folder so that is number one thing don't just use it for files you want other people to see and try not to just create willy-nilly F files within the homes folder or edit any of the permissions within the homes folder because it is all set up for you just don't touch it because you're probably going to break it so another downside to using the home folder and hes folder I'm going to talk about them kind of synonymously here because they're the same thing is snapshots if you use the home folder you're going to see that we do not have the ability to browse previous versions of files within our snapshots here because the way the folder works works and permissions instead only admins can view snapshots even of people's personal folders so that is a really big downside you can't just easily have all of your users restore files within their own home folder using snapshots which is a really great advantage of having snapshots visible in my opinion so another downside that snapshots have when it comes to the home and homes folder is the inability to recover and recover directly so this destination folder which is just a regular shared folder I could recover it restore the snapshot and it's literally going to roll that entire folder back to exactly how it was when that snapshot was taken in about two seconds phenomenal feature great way to get back up and running instantaneously after ransomware occurs but let's say I try to do that with this homes folder we're going to see that there's no option to just restore to this snapshot instead we can only clone to a new name you can't just roll back the homes folder unfortunately because of all the users and permissions in there that sonology does not want you messing with so there's no ability to just restore to that snapshot and roll the entire home's folder back instead you actually have to clone with a new name and copy everything over so that's another downside that snapshots have when it comes to the homes folder one final one is the way that the replication works you can't do a failover of the homes folder on a separate system unfortunately for the same rule rule so if you do a replication you cannot actually replicate the homes folder and have it be a oneclick failover like you can with the rest of your shared folders so those are some big downsides I do want to mention with the home and homes folder are the next one is going to be being able to migrate it and share it with other nases so you can't really replicate the homes folder within syy Drive unless you've properly set up ldap or active directory between the two different units because the home folder has really specific properties to it and it makes it very hard to sync and so if you're planning on being able to have a house in Florida and a house in Texas and you want the two nases to sync using sonology Drive sync a really valuable feature you are going to have a very large headache doing that with your home folder if you're storing all your files within your home folder that sync process is exponentially more complicated to set up because now you have to have a centralized authentication server somewhere in there instead if you're especially a small user and you've just got a folder for you and your spouse I would just create two shared folders one for each person and then you can use syy Drive share sync and edit the permissions on each side all right so now let's talk about when the home and homes folder are used in different applications and it's used in a lot of the most common ones namely sonology drive and sonology photos so we go into the syy Drive admin console going to see under team folder the my drive has been enabled that's because if you've got the homes folder created and actually that's the reason why most people have the homes folder created in the first place it is automatically set up with in sonology drive as the my drive folder so when we come into syge drive we're going to see that I'm signed in with that will user and that same demo folder that was in my home folder is in my my drive folder and they're they're the same folder folder and so this is really set up with that kind of Google Drive setup where my drive is your home folder just with a different name that gives you the ability to easily see files within here so we'll see they're the exact same folder it's labeled home over here and my drive over here and it's really set up where every single person will just see their my drive folder and so the exact same thing actually happens with the personal space within sonology photos when we come into sonology photos and I'm just going to go ahead and upload a single random image into my personal space we're going to see right here that that file is actually going to be stored in the photos folder within my home folder so both sonology drive and sonology photos as well as multiple other applications all stick stuff automatically in the home folder so whoever signed in gets to see those things that is is one of the most confusing pieces is it's really critical about who's signed in to see all of these different things and so that is how the home and homes folder Works in reality it's just the homes folder that's the only actual folder that's created on the nas that's where all the data is stored but every person who signs in sees a folder called home that is just their home folder so when I sign in with the user will what it shows me right here is the home folder of Will and we can see that pretty easily right here this is simply how it works this folder that's labeled home is not a real folder it is just the will folder within the hes folder displayed as a folder called home any modification either one of these they're the same folder just shown in two different places there are a lot of valuable things that the home folder creates it allows everybody to get their own little section of the nas where they can modify files add backups add their photo backups and just kind of create their own little personal section of Nas without having to worry about cluttering up anybody else's folders the downside is the stuff I talked about earlier where it becomes really easily for an administrator to mess up who doesn't really know what they're doing and that's why it's a really good idea if you're an administrator never modify folders within the homes folder you can always come into any single user's home folder Within These folders right here and add and remove file as required but don't just come in here and create a new folder within that as you're going to break a lot of things in doing that there are also some issues with replication and snapshots that can make it much more useful to just sync shared folders across finally if you'd like to move the volume or anything like that the way you actually handle that is under users and group Advanced and this is where you can actually modify what volume and disable the home folder right here or in enable it all right well that should be everything you need to know about the home versus home folder it's got a lot of very useful features on it but you should just be very cautious whenever you're using it especially whenever you open up the folder labeled homes only ever open up that if you need to do something specifically otherwise don't touch that if you'd like to hire me for a project there's a link for that down description below and if you have any other questions go throw those down in the comments below as well as leave any other tutorials you like to see me make all right have a good one [Music] bye

Channel: SpaceRex

Views: 39,177

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Id: 2wqAeJnpOx4

Length: 14min 44sec (884 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 03 2024