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) based folders that I use to archive documents and other files I’m done working on. If I write a news post today, for example, I will initially save it to the Desktop. But when that story is published, I will move it into the appropriate date-based archive folder. (Today, that would be 2025-06). Every few months, I move the older date-based archive folders to their future permanent place, in an Archive folder (which has year-based sub-folders).
• Book. This contains local copies of my current books, which include the Windows 11 Field Guide, Windows Everywhere, Eternal Spring: Our Guide to Mexico City, and a few others that are in-progress. Each is tied to a GitHub repository, so one of the key workflows here is that I need to be able to push changes to the files that constitute each book up to GitHub, which I do from the command line.
• Code. These are my coding projects. The version in Google Drive is out-of-date because there’s some interaction between Google Drive and Visual Studio that prevents the latter from building my projects. So I use the version in OneDrive instead. I kept this here because I will sometimes copy over recent projects as a backup.
• To-do. This is my primary work folder for the site, my company (Thurrott LLC), Eternal Spring, and anything else that is current, ongoing work. Articles that I work on over time, are part of a series, or whatever, are stored here (rather than using the Desktop, which I only use for temporary, usually short-form articles).
• Wallpaper. I keep several background images here so I can get them easily for consistent screenshots.

When I set up the NAS, I created top-level folders in my user account for Apps, Docs, Music, Photos, and Videos. The Docs folder has Archive and Current folders. And the Current folder has Personal and Work folders. The latter looked like so to start.

That was over two weeks ago. In the interim, I had a lot of file copying to do, from various online services, from my NAS, and from USB hard drives. And I had those two trips, so I would be away from the home network. This was ideal for testing various remote access methods, which I will write about separately. But it was also a good opportunity to test the Synology Drive client for Windows. This is advertised to me when I visit Synology Drive on the web, as you can see here. But you can also download it from the Synology website, of course.

On Windows, the Synology Drive client works almost exactly like the Google Drive client. You install it, sign in, and 2FA verify your identity, and it adds a Synology Drive item to the navigation pane in File Explorer. You can browse through this file system normally as shown in the above shots, and the files and folders you see there provide the same icon-based status information–“Available when offline,” “Always available on this device,” and so on–that you see when browsing OneDrive and Google Drive-based file system locations.

To be clear, it supports the same files on demand capabilities as OneDrive and Google Drive, which is key.

That is, with OneDrive, you can right-click a file or folder and choose “Always keep on this device” to make always available, even when you’re offline. With Google Drive and now Synology Drive, there’s an additional step because their custom menu items aren’t on the initial, simplified Windows 11 context menu. So you have to pick “Show more options” to display the longer, old-school Windows 10-style context menu. And from there, you can select “Synology Drive” > “Pin local copy permanently” to make the folder or files always available.

I configured the Synology Drive client to sync the same folders that I’d been syncing on OneDrive and Google Drive–Book, Code, and To-do–so that content would always be available to me. But I only used Code through Synology Drive at first. Just as a general test, to see what the sync/usage performance was like. And also to see if it worked at all, given the issues I have with Google Drive and Visual Studio. This was the first test that Synology Drive passed: It works fine.

In time, I began using Synology Drive for more than just the coding projects. By the time I was back home briefly and then heading up to upstate New York, I had transitioned over to accessing all the book content through Synology Drive as well. This, too, was another compatibility test. In each case, I use specific commands in Terminal to update the primary GitHub repository with whatever changes I’ve made locally; assuming that all goes well, I can then preview the changes in PDF form or publish a new version of the book. For example:

git add *
git commit -am “Testing Synology-based updating”
git push

This, too, worked fine. And so this past weekend, I copied over the latest versions of my date-based archive folders and the To-do and Wallpaper folders to Synology. And then I made the ceremonial but also most important change: I deleted the remaining OneDrive/Google Drive-based quick pins from Quick access in the navigation pane in File Explorer. And I replaced them with versions that point to the same locations in Synology Drive. So those four yellow folders in the middle are now all in Synology Drive.

It’s only been a few days. But based on all the work I’d done before and my general experience with the NAS, I feel good about it. This is going to work. It really is.

On the one hand, this maybe shouldn’t be surprising. Even if file sync was slow for some reason, it’s file sync, not live remote access. Because I sync the content that I use each day locally to the PC’s disk, I’m always working with it locally, on-disk. But the sync appears to be just as nearly instantaneous as anything I see with OneDrive and Google Drive. This may change, we’ll see. But it appears to be identical from functional and performance perspectives.

So I will keep going like this, across all the PCs I review or otherwise use. Assuming it goes well, I will figure out which service(s) to use to automatically back up these folders to OneDrive, Google Drive, and/or whatever else. And in doing so, I will relegate these Big Tech services into an ancillary role. For now, I will simply manually copy a few of the more important folders over every few days, just in case. But … I really don’t see any issues on the horizon. This feels solid.

More soon.