How to Setup Shared Folders, Users, Permissions on WD NAS.
It’s pretty hard to create user accounts and files on a WD NAS with all the jargon and acronyms. For example, folders are called Shares, and User Profiles are called shared profiles. If you don’t understand how to set up folder access and permissions, here’s a quick guide.
How to set up users, permissions, shares on a WD NAS
As a standard process, you should never log in with the “admin” account, as the administrator account has full rights. This can lead to unnecessary deletion of files and folders. Creating a new user account and shared folders solves this problem.
To better explain this, let’s take the analogy of a large house with 3 rooms inside. Suppose there are 9 people living in the house who share rooms. Now, without any prior agreement, confusion arises as to which user should occupy which room. Therefore, for better use, we will divide 9 people into 3 groups and each group will receive a key to their room. They cannot access the other 2 rooms. This way there is no confusion. You can think of your home as your NAS, rooms as shared folders, 9 people as users, and the key as your password.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at how to create Shared Folders, Users, and Groups on the WD NAS. To demonstrate this, we will create a folder called “test”. Then we will create the user “test_user” and “test_group” and grant the appropriate access and permissions.
Read: How To Set Up An Automatic Backup System For Windows
Set up shared access
The easiest way to set up sharing is through the WD web portal. Navigate to it by entering the WD NAS IP address in your web browser. You can find the IP address on the NAS LCD or on your network tabs.
On the toolbar, go to the General tab at the top.
The General tab contains all folders created on your WD NAS. If this is your first time using WD NAS, you will see a few default folders. In my case, I have already created several folders.
Here, click the plus button at the bottom to add a new folder.
A popup will appear, add a title and description for the text. If you created a JBOD volume or you have RAID disabled, select the drive on which the folder should be created.
After you click Apply, a new folder will be created and you will see a summary of the folder. Thus, turn off the sharing of the folder by clicking on the switch. If the folder is public, it will be available to everyone and does not require special permission. When you give users access to folders, shared folders are not displayed in the Shared section.
Set up a user group
After you have created a folder, you need to assign users who can access these folders.
To do this, go to the Users tab to create users and groups.
On the Users tab, you will see 2 sections: Users and Groups. At a basic level, they are the same, with the only difference that groups can contain users. You cannot log on with a group account, and generally, permissions and access are granted to the group. So, next time you create a new user, you just need to add it to the group and all permissions and access settings will be applied to it. If you don’t want to follow this tutorial, skip to the user creation part
Alternatively, you can create a test file with all group configurations using the following command and upload it to the WD web portal. This is useful when you need to create multiple user groups.
After you’ve created a user group, click on it to see a summary and user permissions. At the bottom, you will see a shortcut titled “Sharing”. Here you will see all the personal folders that you have created. For these folders, you will have 3 permissions, namely read / write, read only and deny access. Read-only permission allows the user to view the contents and permissions of a file, and to copy and paste the file to different locations. You cannot delete or cut the file. You will need read / write access to do this. Deny access prevents the user from opening the folder and its contents. In our case, we will provide read / write access to the test folder.
Set up a user account
Finally, we will create a user account named “test_user”. To do this, go to the “User” tab and click the “Add new user” button below.
You will then have a pop-up window where you must provide a username, password, and a few additional details. Publish this, click Apply.
Once a user is created, you can click on it to view a summary of the user. Here you will see the “Group Membership” option with 0 groups written next to it. To add it to a group, click the settings button and in the next pop-up window, select the “test_group” user group.
Once you create a new user account, WD will create a folder named after it. You can delete this folder as it will not affect the user’s profile.
Post this, you should have access to the test folder on the WD NAS. Test it and make sure you are not granting any sharing permissions, volume quota, or access to an individual user account. This may cause discrepancies with user group permissions.
To learn more about WD Backup and Storage, read our article on the right way to back up external drives to your WD NAS. If you have any questions about the WD NAS, let me know in the comments below.
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How to Setup Shared Folders, Users, Permissions on WD NAS
