Versioning is the feature that quietly saves offices every week: yesterday's good copy of the file someone ruined this morning. It is also widely misunderstood — what it costs, how its rotation works, and where its protection ends. Here is the honest version.
Turn on version control for a Team Folder and Synology Drive starts keeping earlier copies of every file — up to 32 versions per file. A bad save, an accidental overwrite, even a folder encrypted by ransomware on a synced PC: the earlier, healthy versions are still sitting on the NAS, ready to restore. That is the promise. This page covers the three things brochures skip — the storage cost, the rotation choice, and the limits.
Versioning is switched on per Team Folder in Drive Admin Console, where you set the maximum number of versions (up to 32) and the rotation policy. From then on, every meaningful save of a file adds a historical version you can browse and restore from the Drive web portal or the client. Two honest details: the history only exists for changes made after you enabled it, and it applies to the folder you enabled it on — a folder created casually outside version control has no past to go back to.
When a file hits its version limit, something must be thrown away. The two policies make very different choices:
For office documents, Intelliversioning is the right default almost every time. FIFO suits folders where only the latest few states matter.
Thirty-two versions does not mean thirty-two full copies of your storage. Drive stores history efficiently — on a Btrfs volume it uses copy-on-write, so versions mostly store what changed rather than whole files again, and Synology's own documentation credits this with saving up to around half the space versus naive copies. The honest caveats: large files that change completely each time (video projects, big archives) still cost real space, and a busy team's version database grows steadily. Budget extra room on the NAS, and glance at folder sizes monthly instead of discovering it at 98% full.
Yes: if a synced PC is hit by ransomware, the encrypted files sync up, but the previous clean versions survive on the NAS and can be restored — this is one of versioning's best real-world uses. Now the edges, stated plainly: you must clean the infected PC before restoring, or it will encrypt the restored files too; the restore is file-by-file work, not one magic button; and versioning protects the files on the NAS from a sick PC — it does nothing if the NAS itself is attacked, stolen or fails. Versioning is a recovery layer, never the whole strategy.
One setting for every folder is lazy. A working pattern for a small office:
Review the choice when a folder's job changes. Versioning is cheap insurance, but like all insurance it should be bought deliberately, folder by folder.
Watch the video to see version control being switched on for a Team Folder and a file rolled back to an earlier version, live.
▶️ Watch Full VideoOpen the file in the Synology Drive web portal or right-click it in the synced folder on your PC and open its version history, pick the version by date and time, and restore it. Restoring makes that version the current one — the newer (bad) version remains in history too, so the action is itself reversible.
No. Versions are stored efficiently — especially on Btrfs volumes, where copy-on-write means mostly the changes are kept, not whole duplicate files. Busy folders with large, fully-rewritten files will still grow, so monitor the NAS rather than assuming.
Up to 32 historical versions per file, and the limit is set per Team Folder by the admin. More history is not automatically better — with Intelliversioning, 32 well-spread versions usually cover weeks of work.