At The Father's House we have JUST completed the third building on our main campus that introduces three new meeting rooms, kids programming on the weekend and adult programming during the week.  With three campuses, off-site offices, and about a dozen devices needing content delivered to them we needed a device that enables us to work smarter and faster.  We've been using a Synology NAS to cloud files between campuses and have recently refined our system.

Synology makes networked attached storages (NAS) with a proprietary OS that is accessed over IP or internet through a web browser. Synology also makes several apps for MacOS and Windows, one of which is Cloudstation which functions identically to Dropbox and Google Drive apps.  The functionality and ease that Synology gives speeds up our workflow a great deal.  With certain models of their NAS's, expandability is as easy as adding a 4 bay rack space device to it.

We utilize the "Shared Folders" feature inside of the Synology NAS to sync assets for all of our services and ministries as well as background CG loops.  The folders currently being synced are:

Weekend Drop: assets pertaining to weekend (adult) services for all campuses.

The Cloud:  assets pertaining to mid week services and special events (i.e. Celebrate Recovery, Youth Service, Weekly Prayer Services, Conference, etc)

Recurring Assets: drop for digital slide systems for all campuses and all buildings.  These synced folders are setup as "hot folders' inside of ProPresenter on our digital signage Mac Minis.

CG: One way sync folder to push newest worship loops to all CG systems  this folder is one way sync so that no campus can delete or move assets in the file structure.

Service Review:  We record service on Blackmagic Design Hyperdeck Studios as well as a an h.264 recorder.  The h.264 file gets synced to our Pastors and Production staff systems so they can review and critique our services.

Here is a sync map we drew before we deployed the Synology NAS.

A couple notes on how we operate:

  • At all of our campuses we run internal SSD's for MacOS and external thunderbolt or USB 3.0 storage enclosures for all of our assets.  Our externals have separate partitions for our asset storage file structure and synced drop folders.  The reason for this is because when drop files from the sync drive to the asset drives it automatically performs a copy instead of a move.
  • We do not directly load assets from the synced folders (except for digital signage systems and CG loops) straight into ProPresenter.  We first drop off of the assets from our synced folders into our asset drives locally so that nothing accidentally get moved or for some reason ProPresenter breaks the link to the file.
  • We separate weekend drop from ministry sync to prevent any file deletion by ministries/events not staffed by weekend volunteers or production staff.

You can achieve the same sync with Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.  We chose to go with an on site device as we have the most systems on our main campus and wanted to sync over network vs web for those devices.

Feel free to give us a shout below if you have any questions!

What we're using:
Synology RS814 (they have since discontinued and are now selling RS815 and RS815)
4x Seagate 4TB IronWolf NAS HDD