Online Accounts 2025: A Little Tech Approach to File Access (Premium)

The Synology NAS has been up and running for over two weeks. I believe I've copied over most of my files, which include many terabytes of personal and work data, current and archived files, and everything in between. I went on two trips during this time, to Seattle for Build 2025 and to upstate New York over the Memorial Day weekend, and I've remotely accessed the NAS from all my devices in a variety of ways. And this past weekend, I completed a transition away from Google Drive and OneDrive, and to Synology Drive, for my daily work across this site, Eternal Spring, my books, and my software development projects. As I write this, I am, in effect, living in Synology. If that makes sense.

There's a lot going on here. Too much, in fact: I will need to break all this down into multiple articles over some period of time. For now, what I will focus on is the bit that matters most to me, the transition that I wasn't honestly sure would ever work well enough for me to make. The ability to use the NAS interactively, all day every day, instead of Google Drive or OneDrive.

There's a lot of history behind this. Too much, in fact: Telling the full tale yet again would waste valuable time and take up too many words, and it would bore you and me both to tears. But a truncated version that sticks to the recent past will suffice. When OneDrive moved from harassing me about Folder backup to simply enabling against my wishes in 2023, I moved all my content into a new folder structure to keep it safe from that behavior, and then I transitioned to using Google Drive instead.

Today, almost two years later, the enshittification of OneDrive continues unabated. As you probably know, I review dozens of laptops each year, and on every one of them, and on all the other PCs I use, OneDrive will prompt me to "backup" (really, sync) my Desktop, Documents, and Pictures folder with the service, I decline those requests, and then Windows 11 just silently enables Folder backup, ignoring me. I still keep copies of my work archive, photo collection, and other important data in OneDrive for redundancy's sake. But from a day-to-day perspective, I had been using OneDrive only for my programming projects, because they don't work properly in Visual Studio when I try to sync them with Google Drive. I also sometimes access sensitive content that I store in the encrypted Personal Vault.

Google Drive has been my go-to for my daily work needs. After installing the Google Drive client, signing in and authenticating, and making a few configuration changes, I can then access my Drive-based folders in File Explorer, much as I do with OneDrive. From File Explorer's perspective, these folders (and the files they contain) are found in C:\Users\paul\Google Drive Streaming\My Drive. And while there are a few top-level folders there, the one that's relevant to this discussion is called Work.

This folder contains the following:

2025-01, 2025-02, etc. These are date (month)...