Move your data to Synology

easy Takes minutes to copy, hours to index

Once you have your data out of the big services and cleaned up, it needs to live somewhere you control. This guide covers moving your archive to Synology.

Synology knowledge base

Step by step

  1. Turn on the half you want

    For Personal Space, open Control Panel, User and Group, Advanced, and enable the user home service - without it there is no home folder to write into. For Shared Space, open Synology Photos, Settings, Shared Space, and enable it. You can have both; they simply show different folders.

  2. Point Muletto at the right folder

    Map the NAS as a network drive first, then export from Muletto straight into it. For Personal Space the target is home/Photos on your own account. For Shared Space it is the /photo shared folder. Writing to any other folder means Synology Photos will never look at it, which is the usual reason a library appears to vanish after copying.

  3. Keep your folder structure

    Synology Photos has a folder view as well as a timeline, so the year and month folders Muletto writes stay meaningful and browsable. You do not need to flatten anything or rename to suit it.

  4. Wait for the indexing, and expect it to take a while

    Once files land, the NAS reads each one, extracts the date and location, and renders thumbnails. On a large library this is hours rather than minutes, and on an older or low-powered model it can run overnight. An empty-looking app an hour in is normal - check again later before concluding anything went wrong.

  5. Check the dates, not just the count

    Synology Photos builds its timeline from the date inside each file. That is what Muletto repairs before you export: without it, a Google or Apple archive arrives dated the day you copied it and the timeline is one enormous day. Open the timeline and scroll back a few years to confirm before you delete anything elsewhere.

  6. Make sure it is actually backed up

    A NAS is not a backup on its own - it is one copy, in one building, on disks that were probably bought together. RAID protects you from a disk failing, not from fire, theft, or deleting the wrong folder. Add Hyper Backup to an external drive or another location, and check a restore works before you rely on it.

Worth knowing

Renaming the shared folder or moving files around underneath Synology Photos means indexing them again from scratch, so settle the structure in Muletto first.
Personal Space only ever shows the logged-in user's own folder. If several people are meant to see the same library, it has to be Shared Space.