118
ADVANCEDPROJECTS
JANUARY2021|COMPUTER SHOPPER|ISSUE395
T
he cloudhas changedalot
of things about howweuse
computers, butone of the
biggestiswiththe likes of
Google Drive and Dropbox
providing asimpleway to
back up andsynchronise
your files between multiple computers.
As good as theseservices are, however,
they cost money if youwant adecent
amount of storage, andthenthere’s the
fact thatall of your documentsend up
sitting on the company’sservers.
There’snoneedtopay for this kind of
service, as it’s likely thatyou canuse your
network-attachedstorage (NAS) device
to do the same thing, only without the
monthly fees andwith agreater amount
of storagespace.
We’reusing aSynology NAS forthis
feature, as this is the system thatwe’ve most
commonly recommended inComputer
Shopper.However,you’llfind that other NAS
devices, including WD and QNAPproducts,
have similar services available.
ThankstoSynology keeping its products
up to date,you caneven run thecloud
software on quite old products.We’ll take
youthrough the full installation here.
INSTALL SYNOLOGY
DRIVE SERVER
To synchronise files from your computers
to yourSynology NAS,you first needto
install theSynologyDrive Server application.
To do this, you needtolog into your
Synology NAS server’s web interface, which
you do viaaweb browser,typing in theIP
address of yourserverintothe browser
address bar. Loginwiththe admin account.
Once you’reatthe Synologydesktop,
open thePackage applicationand then
search forSynology Drive Server in the
list thatappears. Click Install under the
package and it will be downloaded and
installed on your NASautomatically,which
should takeafew minutes.
Once the package is installed, you can
click theOpen button (SynologyDrive
Server can also be found in the main
menu).Thefirst time that youlaunch
Drive Server you’ll be askedifyou want to
refresh the page: accordingtoSynology,
this better supports security enhancements.
Click Yes, and yourweb browserwillrefresh
the page. When you’reback at the Synology
desktop, Drive Server won’t launch
automatically.That’sfine, as first of all we’re
going to set up ourusers.
CREATEUSERS
Drive Server worksbyletting each userhave
theirown login and private folder, which is
stored in the default ‘homes’ folder.Ifyou’ve
already got users setup, you’reready to go;
ABOVE:Getting your NAS ready for sharing files is easy: just install the Synology Drive Server package
ABOVE:Youneed to create users to shareyour files with
