Basic Synology Workings

[ColinTaylor]

Then why does network browsing using Windows 10 v1909 and Synology not work when I turn off SMB1.0?

Because network browsing was a feature of SMBv1 only. It doesn't exist in SMBv2 and SMBv3.

EDIT: Microsoft now uses WS-Discovery (rather than SMB) to populate the computer browser. I don't know anything about Synology but look for an option with that name and enable it.

 

[coxhaus]

How is browsing done in Windows servers now days? I have not run one in several years. I think Microsoft Home Server 2011 was the last one I ran as a server after I retired. I like drive letters as I have been doing it since Novell days. My wife is going to be lost if I map a bunch of drive letters for her to use. I was thinking of using a share for photos and music so we could store them together and then a separate home drive. My wife is going want to use a GUI where she can drag and drop on the network not by drive letter. We probably need a shared tax folder also and probably more that I am not thinking of right now.

How are you guys sharing stuff? Do you just use a home drive?

 

[ColinTaylor]

See the edit in my previous post.

Read this section: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/wi...-default-in-windows#explorer-network-browsing

Basically, Microsoft's position is that you should be mapping drives.

My wife is going want to use a GUI where she can drag and drop on the network not by drive letter. We probably need a shared tax folder also and probably more that I am not thinking of right now.

There's not much difference when using the GUI whether you map the shares to drive letters or not.

 

[coxhaus]

Thanks ColinTaylor. I was thinking old school where there was a drive letter for each share but yours is showing all the shares for 1 drive letter. Are any of your shares shared with other users? Are is it all your home drive?

 

[MichaelCG]

Agreed. Map the drive, tell it to save, and it is just another folder for her to drop files in. If I can teach my wife, you can teach your’s.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[ColinTaylor]

Thanks ColinTaylor. I was thinking old school where there was a drive letter for each share....

That is indeed what is happening.

In the example you can "browse" (using SMBv1) the NUC server and see all the shared folders within it. You can also see that I have mapped //NUC/Media (which is one share) as the Z: drive on my PC.

 

[MichaelCG]

Here is the option to enable WS-Discovery in DSM. It is buried in:
Control Panel --> File Services --> Advanced

I don't have it enabled since I had to enable SMB1.0 for my Sonos already. But I don't rely on announcements anyways for my Windows systems. On my wife's computer, I mapped her drives manually for her. On my computer, I just use UNC paths manually and don't worry about mapping.

As for how do setup your shares? That is all personal preference on how you want to present your data to your users, how you organize data, and how you backup your data.

I have three "shares" that are used by my users.

DATA
- this was a near directly copy of my old windows file server share
- I used a single share on that box with sub-folders that were specific to certain functions with appropriate permissions
- this is the general purpose shared content storage spot
- majority of this content is backed up offsite as well
- this gets mapped as the S: drive on my wife's PC

HOMES
- this is specific to the Synology and this is the UNIX home directory of your users
- I moved user specific data out of the DATA share into each of these folders
- data that needs to be backed up offsite should NOT be in this share - local redundancy only
- this gets mapped as the U: drive on my wife's PC

MEDIA
- this is where Plex, Sage, Sonos, live mostly
- this was broken out from the data share due to ability to easily permission this share by group (needs to be open to all)
- this was broken out as well related to how I do backups within DSM
- this gets mapped as the M: drive on my wife's PC

Keep in mind there are various settings within DSM that may be different depending on the use cases around the data types. For example, the checksum data integrity stuff in theory should not be enabled for things that do real-time constant changes to the files like a VM disk or video capture. That is set at the root share level.

Also to note that DSM is a tad finicky about how some of the cloud sync tools operate and how much overlap you can have on folders and/or services. For example, I use GDrive for most of my pictures and such for backup. So it already is setup within some sub-folders of the DATA share. But I also use DropBox for some very specific use cases. DSM balked at me for having overlap and I had to change my backup/sync configs to accommodate. Instead of configuring "/data/" as my source for GDrive, I had to setup multiple specific sub-folders instead so I could configure Dropbox to a specific sub-folder.

GDrive:

Dropbox:

I started toying with BackBlaze B2 to have more redundancy (worried what happens if my Google account is compromised....don't want to lose all of my data), so I started mucking around there, but I haven't quite figured out how the DSM encryption options really work during data recovery. If my NAS shats itself and I need to buy a new one and recover all data, how do I decrypt all of the data? Until I have time to test that out, I won't move any further on BackBlaze or S3. No way I am putting my data into yet another provider (other than Google who already knows too much about me) without additional protection.