How to NOT sync home folders - Synology Drive

[onefish]

Hi, total Synology noob and setting up a DS1821+ for the first time. I've been transferring data across for 2 days and just finished. I am now installing Drive and I cannot see how to NOT sync home folders. They contain mostly cold data way larger than the hard drives on client devices. I only want to sync the business share folders I have created between Drive server and clients. Is this possible? The Drive admin console directs me to disable home folders altogether, which are full of data.

 

[fredbert]

A new setting in Drive Admin Console v3 is to select how it uses Home folders. You have two options (and this applies to all users):

1. All of a user’s /home folder
2. Only a user’s /home/Drive folder

In Drive v1 and 2 it was fixed at option 2.

 

[onefish]

Thanks for the reply, so it sounds like you are saying that the only options are to sync home or sync a subfolder on home but not an option to not sync anything in home?

 

[fredbert]

Yep. It’s designed as a Dropbox like service for users.

I would set it to use the previous /home/Drive as that gives you some leeway to exclude items while using both Drive and /home.

Allowing Drive to use /home means that users’ personal music and photos folders can be included. Photos folder was something some users want to be included, like it was back with the old Moments package. For me I prefer to limit Drive to a subfolder.

 

[onefish]

So it turns out that there is no way not to activate Drive server for home folders if home folders are being used (as you have said @fredbert). However, I can opt not to sync them in the Drive client, so same end result, home folders are not synced and only reside on the NAS.

 

[fredbert]

I never spent that much time in Drive Admin Console. Recently updated to Drive v3 and see this ...

If you don't want to do that then there's still the option to disable versioning on the selected Team Folder (or MyDrive in this case). I do this for the /music shared/Team folder so that I can access audiobooks/low-fi music files if I need them while travelling and have spotty data coverage..

 

[onefish]

Yah, that's what I originally enquired about. But that was before proceeding through with setting up the clients, where nothing will sync from any share or home folder unless you set up a sync task for it. It does seam a bit counterintuitive, have to activate sync for home on the drive server but don't have to sync. The devs must have their reasons but it seams more logical to simply not enable it in the server if you don't want to sync it. Anyway, the solution is working fine.

I actually turned off versioning for all shares and homes because I have snapshots running fairly regularly. I know they aren't exactly the same thing but I figured snapshots are good enough for our use case and my presumption is that they will take up much less space than 30 versions of every file.