(00:00):
I'm on the road right now and I thought it'd be interesting to share with you how I deal with the video files that I create while I'm traveling and how I get them synced back to the studio. I don't want to be risking losing files on the road. I want to ensure that everything is backed up as quickly as it can be. And if I'm going to do a backup over the internet, why not backup to my own server back home? So I'm using Synology NAS, and one of the big features that I'm using now is something called Synology Drive. Now, Synology Drive kind-of makes your NAS work like Dropbox in that you can have any portion of your NAS synced to your computer, and this is of course a huge advantage when you have limited hard drive space as you do on any laptop compared to the multiple terabytes that you might have on a NAS.
(00:42):
So I'm going to show you the workflow of how this works and also how I'm actually doing it every time I get on the road. So here we go. To start, I want to show you that I am in a hotel with really limited bandwidth right now, so I'm not going to be uploading some huge files. You might be thinking then, “well, what's the point of doing this if you don't have the bandwidth at the hotel?”. What I would typically do is just leave my laptop open overnight and let it sync up overnight. And even if all the data doesn't get there, at least most of it will. It's better to have something than nothing. Over here on the left, you can see my Synology Drive folder on my computer and you can see that I have a whole bunch of projects in here. This is basically everything that is sitting on my NAS right now, and some of these have a little green checkbox next to 'em.
(01:20):
That means that it is synced locally. If I right click on it, I have clicked on “Pin local copy permanently”, and that means that all of the data in that folder has been cached to the local system. Then you can see, of course there's icons that have the cloud on 'em, meaning that nothing is downloaded. If I click the icon, it would start downloading that data, but if I don't pin it, then as soon as the computer needs the space, it'll dump it back off again. And then when I'm done with the project and I want to free up the space, I would right click on it and choose “Unpin local copy”. But then to force it to free up the space, I just click on “Free up space” and that's going to dump the local cache. So now I'm going to create a folder in Synology Drive and add some media to it and let that sync up to my NAS.
(01:57):
But before I do, I'm going to log into the web portal of my NAS so that we can see what's happening there. And keep in mind, my NAS is on the other side of the world. I'm in Las Vegas right now for NAB. My NAS is in my studio in Europe, and so we've got some distance there, but let's check out the web portal. I've already logged in and I'm browsing the NAS. And this is the File Station or basically the file browser, and you can see all the folders here match the ones over here on the local drive. So I'll just create a new folder here and give it today's date and call it “NAS demo”. And that folder is now there. This browser view doesn't refresh automatically. So I'll just click refresh now and we should see… there it is. There's the new folder, “NAS demo”. M
(02:39):
So now let's go ahead and add some media to it. I'll take this video file, drop it into that folder, and it should start syncing right away. There's a status monitor for Synology Drive. We can see that something is syncing right now; we can see the status of that file there, and once that's done, it'll say complete. Okay, it shows that that file has updated, which if I now go to the browser here and open up that “NAS demo” folder, we should see that video file. And there it is. So now I've got my files synced to the NAS. So anything that I add to this folder now will automatically sync up; there's no additional work for me to do.
(03:15):
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(04:15):
So the next step of this is to show how I would then sync the same media from the NAS to another system. So I have a Mac mini at home. It's just kind of an older computer that I do some light editing on at home sometimes, but that does mean that I need to have that media available. So part of my workflow in the studio is whenever I create a new project, I create the new folder as you just saw here, and start adding media to that. But then I'll remote access into my home machine and enable syncing for that specific folder. I want to make sure that that folder is synced there. Now on my machine at home, I don't have it set up to sync the entire folder like I have here. I just do one folder at a time as needed. So lemme show you how I set that up.
(04:55):
And to do that, I'm going to actually remote into my computer at home the same way that I would do from the studio. It's just now I'm doing it from the other side of the world. I'm now connected to my home computer. I'll go ahead and open up the Synology Drive setup and go to settings. And from here I'm going to create a new connection to a new folder. You'll notice here that I am connected by the IP address. Synology NAS can use something called Quick Connect, which is just a simple name. It's like “synology-dash-whatever you want”, and that will connect automatically without having to know the IP address. I have found with remote syncing that it's actually faster if you enter the IP address of the studio or of your home location – wherever that NAS is. Now to do it that way, it does require some port forwarding setup in your router so that when you enter the IP address, it knows where to connect, but it is faste. If you just rely on the Quick Connect setup, you will see some bandwidth limitations.
(05:50):
So this is definitely a faster way to go. It's worth the time to set it up. So that's already connected to my NAS. I'll click next. This is all the media on my NAS, so I'll find that new folder here. I'll select that click OK, – that's the one that I'm syncing – and give it a destination. In this case, I'm putting it on a local drive, but it's actually an external hard drive, so it doesn't have to be the internal drive. So I can choose my external hard drive here. So that's the drive itself. I'll create a new folder there. I'm going to give it that same name and I'll disable “Create an empty folder”. I don't need another extra layer of folders in there. Click OK, and that's it. If you enable on-demand sync, it's going to actually move that folder into the Cloud folder on your internal drive.
(06:33):
This is why I don't have it set to sync everything – that select a sync that you saw on this computer – because that machine at home, that Mac Mini, has the smallest hard drive – 256 GB – and so I can't have any media on the internal drive. With the external drive, you can't do that selective sync. So that's why I'm syncing a manually one folder at a time. So that is left disabled. I click on Done. And you can see here it says that it's now syncing. We see the status of that, and if I open up this folder here, there's a file already syncing down and we can see, well, there it is. It's already done, because of course my connection at home and my connection to the studio is much, much faster. That's the workflow that I do for this. Again, on the road creating the media, it's sinking back to my NAS.
(07:16):
When I'm at the studio, I'm syncing the media from the NAS to my home folder, and that just means that everything's ready no matter what I want to do. And everything of course is backed up. Now at this point, you might be wondering, “why not just use Blackmagic Cloud?”. I'm a Resolve editor. I've talked about Blackmagic Cloud in the past. I think it's fantastic. So why am I not just doing that here? Well, Blackmagic Cloud is absolutely the path of least resistance. It is the easiest way to have your data synced between multiple systems, which effectively is what I'm doing here. So that would work in this situation, but there are some limitations to it. For one, you have no control over what is synced. It's kind of an all or nothing. I create a project, I say, “sync this project to the cloud, or not”.
(07:55):
I can choose to sync just the original media or original and proxy, which does have certain advantages. So for example, if I wanted to be able to edit on my iPad, I would certainly only want the proxy media for that. So I could choose to sync just the proxy media and then open it up on the iPad and pull that proxy media down. So there is advantages to that. I don't really work that way though, and I would rather have this granular control plus, it means that any remote editor can connect to that folder and sync just the media that they need. If you're doing say, just one project per project in Resolve, then it really doesn't matter, you're probably going to sync everything anyway. But say you're working on something larger, I dunno, a feature film, documentary, episodic for example, and everything is stored in one project file,
(08:35):
well, your remote editor may not want to sync all the media for the entire season locally. They just want to sync one episode at a time. They can do that with this type of a workflow where you can't do that if you're doing Blackmagic Cloud. So, again, it's just an all or nothing. So again, certainly advantages to Blackmagic Cloud. It's an awesome setup, but if you want to get more granular and you want to have more control over where the data is stored, then this is certainly the way to do that. That's what I wanted to show you. This workflow clearly isn't for everybody, but if it works for you, then great. I'm glad to have helped you figure out how to do that. If you have questions about how to set this up, by all means drop 'em in the comments or join the Discord server that is part of the PhotoJoseph channel membership. I'd be happy to discuss this with you in more detail. This is not the simplest thing to set up and I've spent quite a bit of time fine tuning it to get it just right. So again, happy to answer any questions about kind-of an optimized workflow for that. So I hope that was helpful. If you enjoyed that, you know what to do, thumbs up, like share all that good stuff, and I'll see you in the next video.
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