The Complete Guide to Remotely Access Synology NAS - All 5 Options Explained

all right how's it going y'all so today I am finally answering the most commonly asked question on this YouTube channel and that is how do I access my files outside of my homes Network this is a question I get asked all the time in comments and it's by far the most commonly asked question and it's a tutorial I really should have done a long time ago and we're going to go over there's actually five different ways you can access your files outside your home's Network so we're going to go over all of them and there's going to be different use cases for every single one of them the majority of people I would recommend just pick one and stick with it but there are specific instances where you might want to use one or the other just based off of workflow and things like that but I'm going to go through and show you how to set up every single one of these independently so you can see exactly how this works we're going to speed through them and I'm going to show you dedicated videos for every one of them but this is going to be the the basics for every single one of them and this should help you be able to access files in Windows File Explorer or Mac OS finder easily being able to access all the files on your Nas wherever you are in the world and before I get into this I do want to add there is a security implication to this I'm going to go over the different options and I am going to talk about that but in a quick summation Quick Connect has pretty good Security in that sense due to the fact that it is running through synology's relay servers and things like that that keep it so that if anything happens Synology is actually blocking a lot of stuff from Ever Getting to your Nas but just know Quick Connect does start to expose your nasty internet and so does web DAV both of those I'm going to talk about both of which the biggest security risk with opening up these protocols is actually somebody password guessing so what I would really make sure to do is especially if you're going to do any of these you really should make sure you've got two things done one all of your passwords should be long and two you should disable the admin account if you haven't already almost everybody will have already I'm just going to throw that out there but if you've not done those things make sure to do that before opening the internet and three it's a good idea to have two-factor authentication if you can on your admin accounts alright so a quick button from Will from the future this tutorial got a little long so I wanted to just note I cover every single way you can connect outside your home's Network to your Synology in this and it can be a lot so to summarize I would look at using Synology Drive which is number two for people who just need to be able to sync some files and pretty low files and not doing this super often and then if you are a business I would really look at number five which is an open VPN server that is going to be your most robust option I just wanted to give that quick disclaimer out there to the fact that this video did get a little long but I've got timestamps on there so just check those and you can speed on through all right thank you back the video all right and so now with that out of the way we're going to go ahead and just get started and we're going to start from easiest Implement to hardest to implement and so I'm going to go ahead and pull up my laptop and let's get going all right so I've just pulled out my laptop as you can see and we have signed into the nas under DSM it's the normal web interface to your Synology and I do want to say one thing you'll notice right here I am running Synology dsm7.2 beta that's just to keep this relevant in the future everything I'm going to show here Works in DSM 7.1 and for the most part also works in dsm-6 so you should be totally fine with that I just wanted to let you all know that that is why it is and then one other thing I'll throw it out there while we're talking I am also going to be having a companion article to this on the space rocks forums so I'm going to go ahead and Link that description below any more complex questions you have about this please put those in the forums YouTube comments are pretty terrible about being able to reply and then also having search is kind of impossible so you have any issues put those in the forums I'll leave a link to this in the description below and that way I can answer the question once and somebody else can find it via Google or just scrolling through there rather than having to deal with good old YouTube comments and just a Wrath of random information all right so now with out of the way we're going to start with number one and number one is by far the most easy to do but it does have that security implication I talked about earlier and that is just to use the Quick Connect web interface so to enable this it is incredibly easy and most people probably already have it enabled all you need to go ahead and do is go into control panel external access and just tick Quick Connect right there this right here is your quick connect link and we can just go ahead and open a new tab and this right here will work wherever you are in the world it will just automatically connect no matter where you are no matter what your firewall rules are pretty much no matter what this will go ahead and work it's very basic and it just works and so this is essentially that interface where you just need to be able to grab a couple of files and so as you can see it pretty much just works and so we can look through here and if we needed to grab any files we just go into file station and just download whatever you need here and upload it it's clunky it's not super easy but in a pinch it's great it's really easy to grab these and if you're doing it pretty rarely it's not terrible it works well enough for those emergency circumstances where you just need to grab a file you can also use the Synology apps in all honesty these are probably better if you're on your phone you can just use the DS file app or if you've got Synology Drive installed you can also use Synology Drive app and both of those will work with a quick connect and give you pretty easy access to your files and if you just need to copy them and send them things like that but really this is just for the most basic access where you might be at the doctor's office and need to grab a form or something where it's really not designed to work out of but if you need it it's there so that's number one just a basic Quick Connect setup and that is really going to be for people who need just the simplest setup and don't need to grab files that often and specifically really don't need to be editing the files on the nas instead it's just like a repository where they just need to be able to download them wherever they are all right and so now on to the second one and from now on we're always going to be working out of either Mac OS finder for people running Mac OS or Windows File Explorer for people running Windows so quick connect was the only one that you didn't just see in Mac OS finder but I did want to throw it out there just for people who need the most basic access number two is basically a continuation of number one it's using Quick Connect but now with Synology Drive so Synology Drive allows you to sync files to your computer from the Nas and both Mac OS and windows now have a on-demand sync function that allows you to not download all the files to your hard drive and instead whenever you click on a file and it's not downloaded it will download on demand I do want to give a disclaimer for this specifically for Mac OS users for Mac OS users the on-demand Sync has issues it is not perfect I would not say it's fully fully fully production ready yet if you get a lot of users it can have some bugs so I would avoid it unless you really have to regular syncing with Mac OS works great but on-demand sync does not work great so if it's only like 20 or 30 gigabytes of files that you want synced perfect just have them always on your computer and then if you're at the airport you've got access to all your files now for Windows users on-demand sync for Windows has been out for a very long time it just came out on Mac OS about three months ago and so it works great there is the occasional bug but it's pretty minuscule overall and so for Windows users on-demand sync should work great but for Mac OS users have some caution there and so it might not be the perfect solution for you all right so now let's talk about what Synology Drive is Synology Drive essentially allows you to get that kind of Google Drive feel where you are able to sync files from the nas to the computer using the Synology Drive client and so there are a couple of steps we need to take to make this happen first we need to go into the package Center and install Synology Drive and as you can see right there I've already installed it but if you haven't you just hit install right there and the next thing we need to do which is kind of odd is for any shared folders you want access to on your computer using Synology drive you actually need to go into the Synology Drive admin console right here go into team folders and enable them as team folders so only things that are team folders will be able to be synced to a computer because those are the only ones that will be indexed by Synology drive so say I wanted to be able to sync demo oh it's like demo hit enable I'm going to just disable versioning and hit OK and now just like that it's indexing and now that will be available in the Synology Drive client so now let's go ahead and install the Synology Drive client on your computer you can just go to synology.com and go to their download Center type in Nas and you can actually select pretty much any Nas that runs Drive I would just do 1819 plus and then under desktop utilities and Synology Drive client hit download and select your specific version I would do Mac OS but you can see it also works for Windows and Ubuntu as well but I've already got it installed so I'm just going to go ahead and open it up so I just go ahead and hit Drive and so right here we can see I've already got a sync task enabled but we're going to go ahead and just create a new one to the new Nas and we're going to say another Synology Nas right here we can just type in our Quick Connect ID and anytime you're using Quick Connect it's going to work wherever you are in the world so just enter your username and password and your quick connect ID and now what we're going to be able to do is Select our sync folders so we're going to choose the folder to sync on our Nas and I just did demos I'm going to select demo and now where you would like to put it so for Mac OS this is specific because if you want to do on-demand sync you don't get to choose where it goes it just goes where it is going to be and you get no control over that that's because it's using the Mac OS protocol that essentially has to put it on the local Drive but if you're using Windows or if you want to select regular sync where it actually downloads everything you can choose where to put it Windows users will be able to select the on-demand sync folder or the regular folder and be able to put it pretty much anywhere I do believe the drive has to be NTFS formatted but don't quote me on that but they have very little restrictions and I do find that the on-demand sync Works quite well on Windows though it is lackluster on Mac OS but now we're going to go ahead and just do a regular sync where it downloads everything here I'm just going to select where to put it and I'm just going to create a new folder called demo for video and you'll notice I always untick create Synology drive folder because I like to specify the exact folder it is Select those two and now what we'll do is we will notice that when we go to that folder when we actually go to that demo for video folder all my files will be there I actually did not have anything in there but we'll go ahead and say and you'll see it will automatically sync we can dump anything we want to in here and now if we go back to our Synology I'll close these two tabs those files are just there you'll notice everything just syncs over very cleanly and it works quite well though once again Mac OS on demand sync is not great so these files are just stored locally on my hard drive right now and so that is option number two this will work wherever you are in the world because we're using quick connect to connect in all right so now on for number three we're actually going to be using a third-party client called twingate and this one is going to allow us to have SMB access that access in Mac osbinder in Windows File Explorer we just go in the sidebar over here and you see oh hey look let's connect to these file servers so I can just connect right into ds923 put my username and password in there and I can connect to all the files exactly how I would so this is how you're accessing your Nas nine percent of the time properly anyway but what we want to do is we want to be able to give you this exact same access outside of your home's Network so both three and five this one and the last one are both going to give you the same ability to connect to the nas exactly like this through Windows File Explorer or Mac OS finder both of these will work totally fine and they're pretty easy to use number three is going to be using a third-party service called tailscale very easy setup but you do have to have an account with them though it is free for up to five devices and number five is actually you creating your own openvpn server both three and five the VPN ones are both by far the most secure method because you're adding a layer of protection in between you and the nas So Not only would they have to be able to break into the VPN server they would then also be able to have to break into your Nas If a hacker tried to get in and so that's very good so you're not just relying on one level of security instead you've got built-in two levels of security there both of those would have to fail before somebody could actually start hacking your Nats or anything like that and both of these are going to require you to have a client installed on your computer and every computer you want to access that's why number four which is going to be webdav is going to be there as an option for people who need to be able to access this from any computer without having a client installed alright so let's go ahead and go through setting up tailscale on Synology Nas and I'm just going to blaze through this because I'm planning on doing a more in-depth video on it but it's very easy you go in the package Center and just go down into tailscale hit install on it note you have to install this when you're on the same local network as the nas you cannot install this over quick connect alright so now it's been installed so let's just go ahead and open it and we just need to open it once we're now going to log into our tailscale account and they do not do authentication themselves you either have to sign up to Google Microsoft or GitHub that's because they do not want to deal with security and having the possibility that they get your credentials breached instead they rely on these much more secure ones to guarantee that they don't even have to have your credentials and so it's kind of a way of sidestepping getting hacked and having passwords linked is they never have your password that's why they do it and you'll notice a lot more like security Focus companies have started doing that because having authentication is tough and makes you a Target so I'm just going to sign in with Google and sign into my account here and then we're just going to say connect and you'll notice that we have now connected on n and this right here is it so I've already got an account here got a fair number of devices so the next thing I need to do is I don't ever want to have to re-authenticate this so I'm just going to click on it here and say disable key expiry so now the key is never going to expire so we're going to be good you'll notice we've now got these IP addresses here they all start with 100. so 100 IP addresses do not route on the internet they are designed for Carrier grade Nat and so that's why they're selected here to make sure they cannot overlap with your local network there's a whole thing about it and it should work for the vast majority of users but this IP address right here is not going to ever change and this is what I'm going to use to contact the nas whenever I'm on the tailscale network and this is my tail scale Network that's mine not anybody else's so I'm just going to hit copy on it and now we're just going to do tailscale on our local computer here so I think I've got it already installed somewhere around here so right here I'm just going to click on it hit login by the way there's also a little tutorial on the tailscale thing you can always hit skip on it but there we go we have now logged in and we are connected on in and I can see that ds923 so now all I need to do right here is hit click on it and it's going to copy that IP address to my clipboard now I can just connect to that Nas anywhere I am in the world so right now I'm on my local network but this will work wherever you are in the world for finder or Windows File Explorer so under finder it's really easy hit go connect a server and then just do SMB colon slash and paste in that number it should start with a 100. you'll know it's worked somewhat when you get this you're attempting to connect and hit connect and then just sign in and voila we've got access to that exact same way where it is connected and over here except this will work wherever we are in the world and so every single time you just need to make sure tailscale is connected it doesn't get disconnected that often but you do that and then you're able to hit go connect a server exactly like that and that IP address is not going to change ever so that's how you do it in Mac OS finder in Windows File Explorer it's very very very easy so you just go to Windows File Explorer and in the top bar you do backslash backslash and paste in that IP address and hit go and that is how you will connect so I've already covered how to connect your NASA on Windows File Explorer I'll leave a link to that description you will notice you're not just going to see it under your network place over here until you connect to it for the very first time that is because this protocol right here only works on what's called a layer 2 Network or layer 3 with multicast DNS so it's not just going to work when you're remotely connected in instead you have to manually tell your computer hey go to this IP address and so that is the one thing you just don't see in your sidebar unfortunately but it will work you just have to remember to paste in that IP address and that is how you use tailscale so that is number three we are now connected in and this will work wherever you're in the world the advantage of this is it's very easy to set up you don't require any port forwarding so you can actually use this on starlink or any other network where you don't have a public IP address and you can't do port forwarding you can actually do this one four and five you cannot do if you don't have the ability to do port forwarding but this one allows you to the one downside is depending on how many devices you've got you may reach the limit and start having to pay or you don't have full control over everything and so that's why we've got options four and five if you want to really self-host everything that is how we do it all right so now I'm going to go ahead and eject that and quit tail skill all right so now for number four number four is web DAV or webdav webdav allows you to use HTTP or https to essentially access files on the nas because it uses those two protocols it is really designed for the internet and that's why it's okay to open up to the Internet though three and five the two VPN options are going to be more secure than this but webdav is a protocol designed for the internet on the internet and so it's unlikely to have too many massive vulnerabilities in it though it can be a bit clunky especially over higher latency connections and so this is the only one of these protocols that will allow you to connect to the nas via Windows File Explorer or Mac OS finder without having to install a specific client on there so if you just need to be able to tell like your one or two contractors how to get there and you don't want them going through a process of installing a bunch of clients and having to do a bunch of things that's where web DAV is very helpful or if you very rarely need access and you need to be able to pop around to different computers that's the other time where it can be nice to have and that's actually the protocol I originally started out with whenever I need it pretty rarely and so to install it we do need to have port forwarding both four and five the next two tutorials require port forwarding the first three did not and we are going to first go into control panel external access ddns and we're going to create a new ddns entry for our unit so we're just going to hit add and we're going to select Synology as the service provider and now we need to give it a host name so we can just go ahead and have any address we want in here that's our obviously not already taken so we'll call it ds923 demo and so then this right here is your external ipv4 address and essentially what DDS does is it always Updates this ds923 demo.synology.me with your public IP address of your router and so that way you can always just connect it back in so we're going to set that up then if you've got ports open if you've got Port 80 open to your Nas you can get a certificate from let's encrypt and set it as default that is an option there and that will prevent you from getting the hey this connection is not secure but we'll go ahead and just skip that and now hit okay and so now we've got this and this step is required for both four and five because we're both self-hosting these so now we're going to go into our package Center and search for web DAV and install it so now we can just go ahead and open it and we're going to enable https that's probably what I would do and select a port we are going to do 5556. choose whatever Port you want here it's not super skier but it is a bit of security through obscurity by doing that and now hit apply so now whatever Port you selected here you need to open up on your router and have it pointing to the NASA's IP address TCP so I'm going to do that on unify really quick but just Google port forwarding and your router name and if you do 5556 select 5556 TCP so I'm just going to do that really quickly and Skip On To The Next Step all right so I just opened up TCP 5556 to my Synology however you want to do that through port forwarding on your router just Google your router's name and I'll do that you're going to also have to do this for the next step for openvpn all right so now we're done there and now we are ready to go we now are just going to be able to use this right here and connect to it via either Mac OS finder or Windows File Explorer and even Linux can do this easy as it can be so first I'm just going to show you how to do it in Macos finder so now we hit go connect server and now we are going to change this to https colon slash that DDS we set up so that was ds923 demo dot Synology dot me colon whatever Port you selected and hit connect now this may or may not work for you on the local network so sometimes you have to get off so I'm going to go ahead and just show that this works by connecting to my hotspot now I'm connected into my Hotspot so it's like I'm off the network and I'm going to hit connect and so if you have not set up the let's encrypt certificate because you're not import open you're going to get this error not a big deal just hit continue and then type in your username and password for the nas and just like that we are connected in we're actually going to see all the shared folders right here it's a bit of a different connection but it will work and show you everything you need access to and you can wrap everything so we can go open up that demo folder just like everything else and drag images on into it whatever we want to do we can just work right from Mac OS finder though this hotspot is taking its sweet sweet time but yeah it just works exactly how you would expect it to and it allows you to access everything through Windows File Explorer or Mac OS finder now I'm going to go ahead and just jump off this hot spot just so we can have faster speeds again because it's pretty darn slow and inject this and I'm going to open up this article right here about how to do this with Windows it's a little bit more complex it's pretty straightforward all you need to do is go ahead and open up this PC hit map and network drive as you normally would and then there's a different option for connect to a website that you can use to show your documents pictures so that is how you do it rather than your standard mapping network drive and you just go choose a custom address and you do the exact same thing that we just showed in Mac OS it's GPS colon slash your thing colon the port number and then you will be good to connect once you enter everything on in the other option is you can also just go in and type in the windows bar the exact same thing I did in Mac OS which was https ds923 demo and the port number you can use the exact same thing if you just put it in Windows File Explorer in the top bar up there all right and so now finally on to our fifth option for accessing files outside of our homes Network and this one is going to be by far the most robust and also able to scale from businesses so this is really what I would recommend most businesses do and it's great because it also allows you access other things and is going to be using openvpn to connect back in which is going to be great so to install this we just need to go to package Center search VPN and download the VPN server I'm blowing through this one because I've already done a tutorial on it but we're going to hit open on it and we're going to select openvpn and enable the openvpn server these are all pretty much good Basics I would not worry about them breaking encryption but it is good to enable the TLs auth key and hit apply now we can go into privilege and say who has access to This openvpn Server and we are also going to need to just restart the openvpn server Again by hitting stop and start because it's gone through and it's actually set up a new authentication key so we want to restart it to make sure it gets in there and now we just hit run and then we just need to export that VPN configuration so we've said hey who's got access to it and now we go into openvpn again and just hit export configuration so now we're going to have this openvpn file and we are going to edit this VPN config.openvpn with any kind of text editor and all we need to do to update is this guy right here change the remote to your synology.me from the last step so it's ds923 demo.synology.me and that's all we need to update and so this is that public address on the internet that is required the next thing you want to do is you want to install openvpn connect for Mac or Windows just Google openvpn connect and there's for Windows and for Mac OS whichever one you want to do all right so now that you have gone ahead and installed openvpn connect and edited that config the next thing you need to do is go ahead and open up the port so whatever Port was selected here you need to open it up on your router so by default it's 1194 UDP so you just need to forward Port 1194 from your router to your Synology UDP so you're going to have to look up exactly how your router does port forwarding I am planning on a full tutorial on how to do port forwarding but you're going to want to do that for a shirt so that way external people can connect in so I'm just going to go ahead and do that now and so I just did that really quickly on my UniFi and now I'm just going to go ahead and open up openvpn connect and you'll notice I've got a lot of profiles in here because that's how I connect to a lot of clients and what I'm going to do is I'm going to take myself off of Wi-Fi and go back on my iPhone so that way it's acting as if I'm remote to the network and just going to drag in this openvpn profile so now it's pretty easy I can just go ahead and name it whatever I want to and type in your username and password for the Synology and it's going to say missing external certificate say don't show again for this profile and continue and now it should have connected so now we are connected into our local network and there's kind of two different options you've got here you could connect to anything but there's some odd things that can happen if your office is on 192.168 and you're home.192.168.1 long story if you know about all that stuff you can get around it but the easiest thing to do is going to be to actually use the specific IP address of this analogy because this analogy is also the router for this op VPN connection so we're now in finder we're just going to go to go connect to server and by default it is hosted on 10.8.0.1 if you change that choose whatever is here and all we need to do is go ahead and say SMB 10.8.0.1 and that is essentially the IP address of the Synology on this openvpn server and so just like that we were able to connect on in and access all of our files exactly how we would if we were on the local network now for Windows you're going to do the exact same thing as the tailscale version we're going to do backslash backslash 10.8.0.1 in Windows File Explorer and connect in like this so just like that we are connected in and everything is just working very easily this is by far the best method if you've got it set up it's going to be the most robust and just rely on you but you do need to set it up though it has got a lot easier recently alright so I know this was a long one we went over a lot of these and so if you want to hire me to set this up for you or your business go ahead and click the link in the description we have gone through and covered five the really five good ways of having a remote connection to your NAS from your computer so this allows you to connect from wherever you are in the world and they've got differing levels of options what I do is I actually use openvpn now which is by far the best method now that there's good clients for mac and windows and it just works very well it's pretty much what I deploy for most my clients now because it allows you to just have access and not have to worry about things if you have any questions on your config go ahead and check out the forums I'm going to leave a link to a post for that just so we can contain it all in one place and hopefully if you have the question the question's already been answered there and if not post about it all right well thanks for watching have a good one bye [Music] thank you

Channel: SpaceRex

Views: 42,047

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Id: o2ck1g3_k3o

Length: 32min 17sec (1937 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 19 2023