File sharing for a running club (I have a Synology NAS)

[MesoForm]

My running club needs a file sharing solution so about a dozen of us can access files, in the past we have used a club GMail account but when the person who set that up left the club it was next to impossible to get it from one phone number to another and I'd rather have a bit more control over it than that.

I do have a NAS at home (Synology DS723+) which supposedly comes with a 'private cloud' but I've been poking about on there and for the life of me I can't figure out how I can invite people to access files without creating a Synology account.

So we need -
1) a few GB of storage, it's just documents and a few photos
2) easy to use for non-techy people
3) ideally no account creation but do need a password
4) free or at least very cheap

With my NAS I thought it'd be easy but I must be missing something!

What are my options?

[Whoozit]

Simpler solution, a shared Dropbox folder?

[TonyRPH]

Exposing a nas to the internet for public access is fraught with issues.

Don't do it.

[thebraketester]

Whoozit said:

Simpler solution, a shared Dropbox folder?

Is the correct answer.

[MesoForm]

thebraketester said:

Whoozit said:

Simpler solution, a shared Dropbox folder?

Is the correct answer.

Thanks, I haven't had much luck with Dropbox in the past with people seeing a message they need to upgrade their Dropbox account in order to see something I've shared.
I'll see if I can figure out what I was doing wrong!

[carl_w]

If anyone has an office 365 licence then you can use OneDrive. One of the advantages is you can set it so that everyone gets local copies, so if the owner gets run over by a bus the folder can be recreated by any of the parties.

[ATG]

We use Google Drive to give shared file access to about 6 of us who do our club's admin. Works OK.

Does anyone have opinions on Google Drive versus Dropbox versus... ?

Edited by ATG on Thursday 19th March 16:49

[x404]

Don't expose your NAS to the internet, as per TonyRPH's advice above, it's a security nightmare. If you did want to do this, a far safer route would be to use Tailscale, but you'd still need accounts on the NAS and a secure set-up just exposing the folders you want additional users to see (quite straightforward with Synology's DSM). Really I'd only use Tailscale for accessing my own NAS, rather than granting others access.

Personally I'd use something like Google Drive, Dropbox (although have had users with similar issues to those you mention, from non-techie users), OneDrive etc. For small projects I've done with less techie people Google Drive has always performed well.

The other option would be to host a simple Wordpress website on some shared hosting, which wold give you a lot of flexibility. You'd need to set-up the permissions for users, you can then all use it for a repository for images in albums, documents, posts etc. You can keep the front end basic and private and only let authorised users see the full site via the Admin panel.

[LunarOne]

MesoForm said:

My running club needs a file sharing solution so about a dozen of us can access files, in the past we have used a club GMail account but when the person who set that up left the club it was next to impossible to get it from one phone number to another and I'd rather have a bit more control over it than that.

I do have a NAS at home (Synology DS723+) which supposedly comes with a 'private cloud' but I've been poking about on there and for the life of me I can't figure out how I can invite people to access files without creating a Synology account.

So we need -
1) a few GB of storage, it's just documents and a few photos
2) easy to use for non-techy people
3) ideally no account creation but do need a password
4) free or at least very cheap

With my NAS I thought it'd be easy but I must be missing something!

What are my options?

It's very easy on your NAS. Using File Station within DSM, just right-click on a file or directory and click on share. That will generate a link or a QR code if you wish, where people can download files. You can set a password if you wish! One thing to be aware of is that you need to have set up QuickConnect first, which gives you a way to access certain bits of your NAS from the internet. Go to Control Panel > External Access > QuickConnect to enable it and give yourself a QuickConnect ID.

Now you should find that file sharing will work. I don't think this is a terrible security risk as QuickConnect only allows access to a limited number of functions from the internet. To be safe, make sure your NAS management accounts use a decent password and use the Synlolgy Secure Signin app on your phone to prevent unauthorised people being able to log into the DSM interface. Or disable access to DSM via QuickConnect entirely.

[48k]

DropBox, OneDrive, Google drive, any of them are a zillion times easier, less hassle and less risky than exposing your NAS on the internet and keeping it secure.

[Condi]

If you wanted a copy you could get the NAS to mirror a Google Drive account, or mirror a certain folder, or simply save the latest update to the files every day.

Google Drive or Dropbox has to be a bit safer than using your own NAS. Also easier to give to someone else - you could set up a running club Google Account and simply give that to the next chairman as people come and go.

[48k]

MesoForm said:

when the person who set that up left the club it was next to impossible to get it

You're actually making this problem worse if you run it on your own NAS at home.

[HantsRat]

MS365 licenses for each user.

Create SharePoint site and grant file access. Can then sync the site to OneDrive client.

[RizzoTheRat]

My running club have switched to Spond, which lets them do event calendars, file sharing and all sorts. Might be worth looking at. https://www.spond.com/

[MesoForm]

Thanks all, it looks like NAS isn't the way to go! A club Google account isn't really an option as it needs a phone number associated with it, that's what led us to this situation so it seems DropBox is the way forward (when it's on sale!).

RizzoTheRat said:

My running club have switched to Spond, which lets them do event calendars, file sharing and all sorts. Might be worth looking at. https://www.spond.com/

Is it really free? We looked at myClubhouse a while back but it was £300 a year which seemed a little steep but it does handle memberships too. I'm on an England Athletics course and some of the other clubs use Spond so maybe I'll suggest it as an alternative.

[RizzoTheRat]

MesoForm said:

RizzoTheRat said:

My running club have switched to Spond, which lets them do event calendars, file sharing and all sorts. Might be worth looking at. https://www.spond.com/

Is it really free? We looked at myClubhouse a while back but it was £300 a year which seemed a little steep but it does handle memberships too. I'm on an England Athletics course and some of the other clubs use Spond so maybe I'll suggest it as an alternative.

I'm not actually on it as it's my club back in the UK and we don't make many of their events. They're a pretty small club though so I doubt they'd have gone for a paid system.

[TonyRPH]

MesoForm said:

Is it really free? We looked at myClubhouse a while back but it was £300 a year which seemed a little steep but it does handle memberships too. I'm on an England Athletics course and some of the other clubs use Spond so maybe I'll suggest it as an alternative.

A quick Google reveals:

https://help.spond.com/app/en/articles/118091-paym...

Spond said:

Spond's business model is built around transactions. Our main goal is to make it easier to organise activities. By helping our users minimise the time they need to spend on admin and finances, we free up valuable time that they can spend on coaching and other valuable activities.

Spond is a free platform and we only make money when our club and group users process their payments through Spond. All transactions are are processed by our secure payments partner, Stripe.

Overview of transaction fees in the Spond App

The prices include transaction fees charged by our payment provider, Stripe, as well as the safe and secure handling of the entire payment process. This makes it easy for you to send out payment requests to your members. Members who use the app will receive the request directly in the app, while those who do not will receive it by email.

It's actually easier to ask Google and get a result instead of wondering about it on a forum...

[paulrockliffe]

HantsRat said:

MS365 licenses for each user.

Create SharePoint site and grant file access. Can then sync the site to OneDrive client.

This is the 'best' solution, because you can use all the other stuff to setup the Club extremely professionally, but it's 12 x License every month, which is going to be far too expensive.

You're looking to scale this sort of approach back until you drop into someone's free tier really, but no one is really advertising making it simple to see what you can do in their cloud for free because they want your money.

The NAS thing, you can setup your own Cloud and secure it fairly easy and get what you want at no cost, but the Admin over-head then all falls on you, which likely isn't what you want. Stuff like NextCloud sat behind a domain and secured through Cloudflare is entirely free, other than paying for the web address, which is buttons. You can manage back-ups to One Drive or Google Drive or Dropbox or whatever you have an account for so you've got failure covered, but it's going to be more hassle than I suspect you're after.

Have you considered what you can do with Teams using a free Microsoft Account? I'm not sure where the restrictions fall because I have a paid personal office 365 subscription, but if I go in Teams and create a Community, I could invite 11 others in there, drop files in and run a running club there fairly easily and you're getting comms on top of file share too. You can configure your NAS to backup the files from Teams so they're not entirely Cloud too.

But everyone would need to sign their email address up to a free Microsoft Account and agree to use Teams. I think that you'll have to have everyone sign up to something though, even self-hosting on the NAS you'll need to do something about credentials one way or another.

[butchstewie]

Is there any sort of organisation or structure or just a few people running together?

I don't want to be that guy but GDPR and compliance can be a thing for even the smallest organisations.

Especially when that nice bloke you go running with turns out to be some litigious nutter on the slim off chance the group have a falling out etc.

[carl_w]

paulrockliffe said:

But everyone would need to sign their email address up to a free Microsoft Account and agree to use Teams. I think that you'll have to have everyone sign up to something though, even self-hosting on the NAS you'll need to do something about credentials one way or another.

Agreed because security by obscurity is no security at all.