Swazzy

Synology’s FileStation UI doesn’t allow you to create true symbolic links (softlinks). Instead, it only supports creating “shortcuts,” which show up under Favorites or on the Desktop—these are not actual filesystem symlinks.

The good news is that Synology’s operating system is based on Alpine Linux, so you can easily create symlinks by connecting via SSH.

Once logged in, simply run the following command:

ln -s /source /destination

Creating a symlink via SSH is straightforward, but there’s a catch: symbolic links won’t appear in the FileStation UI. So if visibility in FileStation is your goal, this method may not be very useful.

A better alternative is to use Linux’s bind mount feature, which allows you to map one folder to another using the mount command. To make this configuration persistent across reboots, you’ll need to edit Synology’s fstab file to include the bind mount setup.

To test the command you can run the following

sudo mount --bind /source /destination

Once you’ve confirmed your configuration is working as expected and verified it in FileStation, you can unmount the destination using:

sudo umount /destination

Next, append the configuration to your /etc/fstab file to ensure it persists after a reboot. Make sure the target directory already exists before proceeding.

mkdir /volume2/homes/username/Drive/BoundedFolder && sudo echo "/volume2/homes/username/Drive/MyFolder /volume2/homes/username/Drive/BoundedFolder none bind,user,auto 0 0" >> /etc/fstab

At this point, BoundedFolder should mirror the contents of MyFolder, and you can interact with it normally through FileStation or any other user interface.