Sync Windows laptop to Synology NAS

There are, no doubt, many ways to backup your files to a NAS box. Synology specifically allows the installation of various apps. None of those are necessary if your aim is to keep a copy of all your data files on a Windows laptop.

Windows Built-In File Sync.

A long time ago, in the early days of Windows networking Microsoft included features to store the contents of the Windows users folders, on a network share.

There is little control, nor need for control, of how it does this. When you logon to your laptop and it can connect to the network share, it will carry out a bi-directional synchronisation of any folders setup to do so.

The sync., is limited by the speed of the components, such as network and disk drives but that's about it.

BACKUP the Files Before I do anything like this I always take a copy of anything that could be affected. Things do not always go to plan. In this case I simply copy ALL of the files to temporary folders, away from where I will be working. That could be off of the root of the C: drive or better still on to a removable disk. If it is on the same machine I would create folders, similar to the following: C:\Temp\DocumentsCopy C:\Temp\PicturesCopy C:\Temp\MusicCopy C:\Temp\VideosCopy When finished moving the folders to the network, and I am sure that the files are all where they should be, the temp folders can be deleted.

What Will The Built-In Sync., Do?

• Copy every file in any specified folders to and from the NAS.
• No user intervention, except in rare cases.
• Keeps a copy on the computer. If it is a laptop, you can work on it wherever you are and when you return home, it will sync., any file changes.
• It will sync., between multiple machines. If that is useful to you.

What Won't It Do?

• It will not backup the operating system.
• It will not backup applications.
• It is not reliable at backing up user settings, so these instructions do not include that detail.

I have also not included setting this up to work remotely over a VPN, because I have not tried it.

What to do on the Synology

Connect to the Synology NAS using a web browser.

Setup a normal user account. I strongly recommend an additional account, not the default admin account.

Control Panel - User

If you are the main user, you could give yourself admin rights, at least for the duration of the setup.

Control Panel - File Services

The core requirement for Windows networking is SMB (Server Message Block.) It is probably enabled by default on the NAS box.

One thing to note is the box at the bottom that shows the Universal Naming Convention (UNC) path to the NAS box. This can be tricky to get working, so I just use the IP address.

It should work, if the following option is enabled.

Advanced TAB (not the button)

Back to the SMB/AFP/NFS TAB

If you are curious, all of the initialisms on this tab are different types of network file systems. AFP is used by Apple Mac computers and NFS is an open standard which I rarely come across being used.

SMB is widely used, including by Microsoft.

Advanced Settings BUTTON (not the tab)

I would hope that by now SMB 2 is the default and SMB 1 is disabled but worth checking. The minimum SMB protocol should be SMB 2.

The reason for this is that SMB 1 is insecure and should not be used.

Windows 10 also supports SMB 3, so if you only have Windows 10 computers you can change the Maximum SMB protocol to SMB 3.

That's all that is necessary for Windows networking and it is probably already setup for you.

What to do on the Windows computer

I find it useful to setup a Quick Access link to the file system on the NAS box. I go to it so often, especially during setup, that this saves time.

File Explorer

The IP address of my NAS box, for the sake of this example, is 192.168.1.40. If you have managed to get the UNC name to work, then you can use that instead of the IP address.

Whatever you use, type the address preceded by "\\", in to the address bar. In my case "\\192.168.1.40" Get the slashes the correct way round, the other way will take you to the internet and fail.

At this point, if it is the first time you have browsed to the NAS, you should be prompted for your Synology NAS login.

This is asking for the username and password of the account you setup on the NAS box.  This is NOT your Windows login details

Tick the box to Remember otherwise the synchronisation will be unreliable because it won't work until you login. If you tick to remember the credentials, it is all automatic.

Drag the UNC in File Explorer

Now you have logged in, drag the UNC or IP of the NAS, from the address bar in to the Quick Access list to create yourself a very convenient shortcut.

Create Folders

All being well, you should be able to navigate to your own user folder on the NAS box.

Create 4 folders under your name:

• Documents
• Music
• Pictures
• Videos

I recommend that you do not include Desktop in this list. If you are the sort of person that habitually saves to the Desktop, I would urge you to change your behaviour and use Documents, where data files are intended to be.

If you decide to do Desktop, you are on your own with that one.

There is no harm doing Downloads, as far as I know, but, in my case, I end up with a whole bunch of junk in there that would just waste performance copying to the NAS.

Enable Offline Files

This gives the option to keep a copy on the local machine, of network folders that are on the NAS box. A laptop can then be used anywhere and files sync., when returning to the home network.

Control Panel - Sync Centre

Manage offline files

Make sure offline files is enabled, if not, then press the button to enable the feature.

Change the Folder Locations to the NAS

In File Explorer in the side bar, under "This PC", one at a time, for each of the four folders we have selected, right click, go to the properties of the shortcuts in File Explorer.

Go to the Location Tab.

The image above, shows the result after the move. Prior to the move the location would be on the local hard drive.

Press the Move... button.

As all of my computers are done, I cannot reproduce the screens but what should happen is that you navigate to the corresponding folder on you NAS box, for your user account, and move.

There will be a prompt you need to accept but I can't remember what it says.

I recommend trying a folder that has the least content, just in case you need to slightly change the procedure. As you can see, there is a button to Restore Default, so you can roll this back.

Do the same for all four folders.

Always Available Offline

To keep a copy on the local machine it is necessary to set that folder to be available offline. See above to ensure that the offline files feature has been anabled.

Right clicking on the shortcut should show an option:

There should be a tick next to a heading of  'Always available offline'.

Failing that, it is available from a Tab in the properties of the shortcut.

Use the Sync now button to kick off storing a local copy.

Finished

Well, wait a while, might be a long while, if you have a lot of files.

You can follow the progress on the NAS box web interface or the full UNC path to the NAS box in file explorer.

Testing

When you think it is all finished. Create a test file in each folder, make sure it has contents, sometimes zero size files don't sync.

Make sure the files get to the NAS box. It's not instant, Windows does it in it's own time to minimise the performance impact on the machine.

Conclusion

The instructions are not fully detailed but hopefully anything I have missed is obvious when you come to do it.

Extras

Microsoft Office File Security

Microsoft Office includes security features to protect you from malicious files.

If you edit files directly on the NAS box you are likely to encounter this protection. An extra butoon in a yellow warning bar that you have to press before you can make any changes.

If you always edit files on your own computer and let the synchronisation copy the files to the NAS box then you don't need to worry about this.

If you do work directly on the NAS box file shares, the extra prompts can be annoying. The best security is to leave it enabled but I tend to turn to off.

Open Any Microsoft Office Application.

File - Options

Trust Centre

Press the button for Trust Center Settings.

Tick the option, near the bottom that Microsoft does not recommend.

Network Trusted Location

Windows, by default, will not trust network locations. It will add additional warning messages when you try to do things like, copy, rename and delete when working on files directly on a local NAS box.

If you only ever save to your machine and let Windows sync the files to the NAS box, then the following is of no benefit to you.

I have network shares directly on my NAS box, lots of them and I find all the warning messages a little tiresome. They can be avoided by setting the local network as trusted. This is done from the internet options in control panel.

Control Panel - Internet Options

Security TAB

Local Intranet

Press the Sites button.

Press the Advanced button.

In the 'Add this website...' box, type in the first part of your local network IP range and use a * for the last octet. (This is not how subnets work but if you have a more complex home network, you already know that.)

Your network may not be the same as mine. Enter your IP range.

Press the Add button.

Close and OK back to the control panel.

Hopefully that will reduce the number of warning messages for working on the network.

Restoring Windows

These instructions are not for backing up a Windows computer but they can have a part to play.

It is very difficult to create a backup of a modern Windows computer that could be restored on to another computer.

To recover from a catastrophic machine failure, the operating system needs to be installed from scratch on the new machine. The user account created, then each folder moved, as per these instructions. The files will then sync., back to the computer in their own time.

While that's happening, it is an opportunity to install the required applications on to the computer.

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Increase Synology DS412+ NAS capacity

We take a lot of photos and have a lot of videos and after a few years we have started to run out of storage on our main Network Attached Storage (NAS).

It is time to add more storage to our Synology DS412+ NAS. It was using 4x 2TB.

With larger capacity drives available it would have been nice to drop down to use only 3 disks and have a hot standby. I did a lot of checking and there is no way to reduce the number of disks within an existing array. I'm not prepared for the days of downtime to do backups and restores so I have to stick with the full 4 disks that I am using.

Synology Hybrid Raid (SHR) volumes support mixed sized disks so I am upgrading only some of them from 2TB to 8TB disks.

The way the fault tolerance works, the calculation for space is fairly easy. The capacity equal to the largest disk is lost to parity bits.  Another way to think about it is to just add up the total capacity of all the disks and deduct the capacity of the largest and that gives you the usable space.

I decided to swap two disk so my capacity goes from a usable 5.4TB to 10.8TB.
Due to the way hard disk manufacturers calculate size and the overhead of file systems a disk rated at 2TB only has about 1.8TB of usable space and an 8TB disk has a little over 7.2TB of usable space!

I have also bought an additional 8TB drive to keep as a cold spare in case of disk failure. I trust the Western Digital Red NAS drives that I have but no matter how good they are, drives are a mechanical device and can fail.

There are already a few good sets of instructions about how to increase the capacity of the array so I won't go in to much detail here.

The DS412+ that I have supports hot swapping of drives so that means the thing can carry on running as normal while the work takes place. The DS412+ processor is also fast enough so that unless you are particularly sensitive, the performance remains at an acceptable level throughout the process. Just slightly slower logins and response in the user interface but access to files from the network is not noticeably changed.

The steps:

• Backup all your data
• Just in case you didn't read that, make sure you have a good backup before you start.
• * Storage manager *
• Check that all disks are normal and that there is no existing repair in progress.
• Pull out one of the drives (I have a hot swap model, you may have to power yours off to do this bit)
• Put in a larger capacity drive
• * Storage manager *
• -- Manage
• ---- Repair
• ---- Next
• Select the new drive, which is probably the only choice and already ticked
• ---- Next
• Read and accept the warning. Only continue if you are sure
• Wait, many hours...

After the first drive has completely repaired you can do the next drive.

In my case it was the backups before I started that took the time. Luckily my monthly backups had just run but my less frequent photo backup was months out of date so I had to run that. In my case that took nearly two days! It's the increase in that type of data which requires me to increase the capacity in the NAS.

The repair of the first drive took less than 11 hours. I didn't sit and watch it so I can't be more accurate. The second drive took less than 6 hours.

The first disk does not add any more space because it is taken up with the parity information but on completion of the repair on the second drive the Synology automatically expands the volume.

Job done. I now have nearly double the capacity.

--

As a historical note, going back about 30 years, my first IBM PC clone had a massive, for the time, storage of 80MB. That was in 2x 40MB 5.25" hard drives.

The total capacity I have connected to my home network today is now over 200,000 times that!

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Note:
I have now expanded the capacity on several Synology NAS boxes and all but one has worked cleanly. On just one I have ended up with a 'System Volume error' being repeatedly reported in the log. I was unable to repair this with any of the Synology tools so I had no choice but to backup everything then delete and recreate the volume. Easy enough to do but the backups took days especially as I took multiple copies of the most critical data.

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MultCloud review

Following on from my post the other day about AmazonDrive I have been using MultCloud to help me transfer from OneDrive to AmazonDrive.

I started off doing it the hard way. Setting my NAS to sync to AmazonDrive and in conjunction using a different Internet connection to manually upload photos. One of those methods is slow due to the amount of data involved and the other is time consuming doing a few folders at a time.

I hunted around for a cloud storage aggregator service. There are a few, like Mover.io and Otixio that are often mentioned in reviews but for some reason MultCloud is less commonly mentioned. From my experience it should be number one on people's lists. Hence this review.

The advantage of using an online service is that it is not constrained by the speed of my own Internet connection. The files transfer via the aggregators servers. From my perspective, direct from one storage location to another. I can log off or shutdown and the transfer carries on behind the scenes, day and night.

The other providers I looked at had very limited or no free offering and worked out very expensive for the near terabyte of photos I need to transfer. MultCloud is very generous with its limits and supported all the storage providers I needed plus lots more and it gets better...

MultCloud's free tier offers up to 2TB of data transfer. I thought the two terabytes was a typing mistake. I had to check several times and found it repeated in their documentation. Good for them.

I'm using it now and I can say it works very well.

Configuring the cloud end points and adding transfer tasks was easy. It even supported creating the target folder as it went. I now just sit back and wait.

The free service uses only 2 threads and is in no particular hurry but it is still more than twice as fast as I could do it any other way. In addition it is far simpler, just sitting there in the cloud while I get on with other things.

I think a lot of cloud companies might be missing a trick. I'd be prepared to pay a small one off fee for a week or months' use but I don't want to get stuck paying recurring fees for a service I only need once every few years.

I'm happy, the job is getting done at no cost to me. Thank you MultCloud.

AmazonDrive review

UPDATE: November 2020

Amazon Drive no longer works with Synology Cloud Sync.

I don't know the details but my understanding is that this is something Amazon have prohibited.

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ARCHIVE:

It's very early days but I have so far been very impressed by AmazonDrive. So much so that it has made me want to write a few comments.

Firstly I need to be clear about my usage, as that may determine if what I say is helpful to you or not applicable.

I want a way to backup the contents of my Synology NAS to the cloud automatically. I do not want any process running on a PC to facilitate that. It must be a direct NAS to cloud file copy.

The true backup providers, like HiDrive, that support NAS backups, are too expensive for the amount of data I want to store. I therefore have to use a consumer cloud storage synchronisation solution. There are several available, Microsoft OneDrive, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive and of course AmazonDrive that I have just started to use. There are others but I don't know enough about them to consider using them.

The most important data that I want to protect are our irreplaceable photos. We have getting on for nearly 20 years of photos in digital form, taking up over 800GB at the moment and currently growing by over 200GB per year!

I thought I had a solution in OneDrive because, a couple of years' ago, they offered unlimited cloud storage and I specifically took out OneDrive then, for this very purpose. I knew Microsoft had stopped that offer but I had stupidly assumed that Microsoft would honour their contract and retain unlimited space for those existing customers.

I was wrong, Microsoft have now started to cull drives over 1TB. They claimed customers were abusing the available storage space but if you offer unlimited, people are going to take you at your word. Don't blame customers for selecting the best value product for their needs!

I am just on the cusp of the terabyte that Microsoft have limited us to but in a month or two I would easily be over that storage limit! I can be as annoyed as I like with Microsoft but I can't see that getting me my storage back. I therefore have to find an alternative.

Of the providers listed above, at this moment in time, only Amazon offers an unlimited or large capacity solution at a price I am prepared to pay and that I can use directly from my NAS box.

I have signed up for the free trial of AmazonDrive that will continue on to the paid solution in three months' time.

I am most interested in the NAS synchronisation and the web client. I specifically do not want a desktop client that synchronises to my hard drive. I have nearly a terabyte of data in the cloud and only a 256GB SSD on my laptop. Microsoft OneDrive is a pain, being automatically installed and linking to the cloud automatically. Even when I set the client to online files only, the local directory information for the thousands of files I have online, takes up a large chunk of the local hard drive!

With AmazonDrive I can opt not to use the client at all.

The web client supports drag and drop file, and more importantly for my initial setup, folder upload.
It is a clean interface with just the options I need.

The Synology client for AmazonDrive is part of the same tool used for OneDrive and Google Drive etc..

So far AmazonDrive has worked well. It does not have all the sort and view options of some of the others and does not have any online editing, as far as I can tell but for pure storage and ease of use, it suits what I need it for.

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Update:
I used a cloud storage aggregator to help with the transfer of the data.

Synology Cloud Sync Issues

I use OneDrive for my online storage. Microsoft provide unlimited space with my account so I am keen to use it with my Synology NAS box as an online copy.

The NAS box stores everything on my home network. I have it setup with my user home drives from all the computers and have organised shared areas for projects I've worked on over the years, there are home videos and all our photo's stretching back over a decade. There are lots of files that I would not want to be without. I obviously want to keep them all backed up.

I use a large USB disk for the primary backup but I would like to have an off-site copy. Synology provide the app Cloud Sync. It's not a backup solution but is useful for synchronising files and is the only way to get files to and from OneDrive using the NAS box. Unfortunately it has some peculiarities.

I've had it running for some time now and it appears to work OK. Today I tried to synchronise an extra folder structure but it failed on every file and folder!

In the interface on the Synology, I could click a previously unsync'ed folder but the log in the history tab said 'Download Failed' for every file!

The only way I could find to fix it was to Unlink the Synology profile from OneDrive and add a new one with a different name. If I used the same name if would create new folders but none of the files synchronised.

I could select the same folder structure, so at least it appears to only be downloading files it hasn't already got.

It has started to download files now but it will be a few days or weeks before everything it should download has completed!