Setting up Tailscale and Synology for sharing video files

Steve and I produce a lot of video. I record and he does all the producing and editing, so we end up sharing pretty big files across the internet, as we're not in the same city.

A while back I bought a Synology DS1522+ and put five 6TB Western Digital drives in it. In a RAID 5 setup, this give me ~22 terabytes of usable space.

My workflow is to record all my footage on my MacBook, shuffle it across to the NAS (which is in my studio), and then sync individual folders from the NAS to Google Drive so that Steve can download the files and start working on them. It works, but it's not great.

It also doesn't scale very well as we grow. Only individual folders are synced to Google Drive, the sync is one-way only, and we were filling up our Drive quite quickly.

When I first got the Synology, many people told me to install Tailscale, but I never actually understood what it does. Their website says:

Tailscale makes creating software-defined networks easy: securely connecting users, services, and devices.

It wasn't entirely clear to me why I'd want that! But now, I get it. Tailscale makes it easy for Steve to access files on my NAS. That's it!

I installed Tailscale on the Synology and then Steve installed it on his computer as well. With it installed, Steve can add the NAS as an SMB share on his Mac and access the Synology just like any other connected drive. (Although it is slower, since it's going over the internet.)

To take it a step further, I added a DNS record to tryhardstudios.com such that nas.ts.tryhardstudios.com points to the NAS. So he can just point Finder to that URL and it'll load up the NAS. Pretty awesome!

This is going to help us in the future when we have more editors too. We can add them to our Tailscale account and they can pull files off of the main storage. I also like that we don't have store the media in the cloud, as there is quite a bit of it. (We do back the NAS up to Backblaze though.)

I'll admit I'm a very remedial Tailscale user. I don't know all of the neat things I can do with it! If you do, I'd love to hear more. Our use case is pretty simple, but I'm always open to learning new tricks.