Every Synology Drive user sees two places to keep files — Team Folders and My Drive — and most people pick by habit. Pick wrong, and office work ends up locked inside one person's private space. Here is the honest difference.
Open Synology Drive and you will see shared folders with names like Projects, and a personal space called My Drive. They look similar, they sync the same way, and that is exactly the trap. Underneath, they have different owners, different admins and different futures. This page explains both in plain words so your office files land in the right home from the start.
A Team Folder is an ordinary DSM shared folder that an admin has enabled in Drive Admin Console > Team Folder. The folder belongs to the office, not to any person. The admin controls who can open it (by user or group), how many file versions it keeps, and whether members can share links from it. When staff open Drive, Team Folders are simply there, ready to sync to their PCs with Drive Client. Think of a Team Folder as the digital version of the office filing cabinet — one per department or project.
My Drive is each user's personal space on the NAS, created automatically with their account (it lives in their DSM home folder). Nobody else in the team sees it by default. It is the right place for personal working files — drafts not ready to share, a scan of your own documents, your private notes. It is also where a user's backup tasks land their copies. Think of My Drive as the drawer of your own desk: yours, private, and not where the team's only copy of anything should live.
Here is the question that separates the two better than any definition: if this person left the company tomorrow, what happens to the files?
Any file the business would miss belongs in a Team Folder, even if only one person works on it today.
Second question: does anyone else need this file — now, or plausibly ever? Quotations the sales team reuses, the accounts workbook, project drawings — these are Team Folder files, because the second person who needs them should not have to ask the first person to 'send it'. My Drive files can be shared with a link when needed, but a shared link is a copy sent out, not a place a team works together. If a file gets requested twice, it has already told you where it belongs.
My Drive is private from other staff — colleagues cannot browse it. But do not promise employees it is private from the admin: the person who administers the NAS manages accounts and storage, and in a company system the honest understanding is that work data on work equipment belongs to the company. Say this out loud when you roll Drive out. It builds more trust than a privacy promise you cannot fully keep, and it stops staff storing genuinely personal things on the office NAS.
Give the team one rule and repeat it until it sticks:
Admins should review Team Folders monthly — what is enabled, who has access, whether versioning is on. Five minutes of governance beats a day of recovery.
See how Team Folders are enabled and shared in the complete Synology Drive setup video — Admin Console, permissions and clients, all live.
▶️ Watch Full VideoYes. Team Folder access follows DSM user and group permissions, so you can give the Accounts group access to the Accounts folder and no access at all to Design Files. Users only see the Team Folders they have rights to.
No — enabling a Team Folder is an admin action in Drive Admin Console, done on shared folders. That is deliberate: shared spaces are created by the office, not by individual habit.
They stay with the account until an admin deals with them. The safe routine is to review and hand over anything the business needs before disabling or deleting the account — one more reason shared work should live in Team Folders from the start.