NAS WebDAV: Synology and QNAP Setup, Then Mounting It

What NAS WebDAV is for, and the decision to make first

WebDAV earns its place the moment the NAS has to be reachable from outside the LAN, because it is HTTP: one port, one certificate, one thing to publish, and it survives hotel wifi and corporate proxies that block SMB outright.

Decide the permission model first. Both vendors expose it, differently — Synology through shared-folder permissions plus an optional anonymous account, QNAP through an explicit choice between two permission sources. Get it wrong and you spend an afternoon on a 401 that has nothing to do with WebDAV.

Everything below was checked on kb.synology.com and docs.qnap.com in September 2026.

Synology: the WebDAV Server package

WebDAV on DSM is not part of File Services; it is a separate package with its own window. Synology's help describes WebDAV as "an extension of the HTTP protocol that allows users to remotely explore data on your Synology NAS".

1. Install WebDAV Server from Package Center and launch it.
2. Go to Settings > HTTP/HTTPS.
3. Select Enable HTTP and Enable HTTPS. Synology's wording: "By default, the HTTP port is 5005, and the HTTPS port is 5006. You can customize the port number according to your needs."
4. Click Apply.
5. Open Settings > Advanced Settings and decide on the four options there before you hand the URL to anyone.

Those four options are where the interesting behaviour lives, and three of them explain most of the oddities that show up later.

Anonymous WebDAV is not one checkbox. Synology's help spells out the second half: go to Control Panel > Shared Folder, edit the target folder, open Permissions, choose System internal user from the drop-down, and give the Anonymous FTP/Presto/WebDAV user access. If you ticked the box and nothing changed, this is why.

One more documented fact before you publish the endpoint: the package supports per-user and per-group speed limits, including scheduled ones — a throttle that is trivial to set, easy to forget, and indistinguishable from a slow network six months later.

QNAP: one checkbox in Control Panel, one real choice

QTS puts WebDAV with the other file-sharing protocols rather than in a package. QNAP's own summary is that WebDAV "allows you to share, copy, move and edit remote content on the web".

1. Log on to QTS as administrator.
2. Go to Control Panel > Network & File Services > Win/MAC/NFS/WebDAV > WebDAV.
3. Select Enable WebDAV.
4. Choose the permission source: Shared folder permission or WebDAV permission.
5. Optionally configure the port. Dedicated port number lets you "manually specify the port numbers for unencrypted (HTTP) and encrypted (HTTPS) connections"; Web server port number is described only as "select to use the default WebDAV port numbers".
6. Click Apply. QNAP notes that "Network & Virtual Switch enables WebDAV and saves the settings".

Step 4 is the one to think about. Shared folder permission reuses the access lists you already maintain in QTS; WebDAV permission is a separate list that applies only over WebDAV, which is what you want when WebDAV is the internet-facing door.

Note what the documentation does not say: QNAP's pages never print the default WebDAV port numbers. The only figure in its own examples is the web server port, 80, in the mount path http://172.17.45.155:80/Public. Set a dedicated port if you want certainty.

Connecting from Windows 11

This is where NAS WebDAV goes wrong most often, and each vendor documents its own workaround.

QNAP's path is the ordinary wizard: File Explorer, right-click This PC, Map network drive, then the path in QNAP's documented format — http://NAS-IP-address: port number/shared-folder-name, their example http://172.17.45.155:80/Public — with Reconnect at sign-in and Connect using different credentials enabled. If it fails, QNAP's own troubleshooting page sends you into the registry: regedit, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient\Parameters, open BasicAuthLevel, "set the value data to 2", restart the computer.

Synology takes a harder line. To use Windows' Map Network Drive over WebDAV, "you must get a valid SSL certificate and access the Synology NAS via an HTTPS connection" — the HTTPS port, 5006 by default, with a certificate the machine actually trusts. The same note adds a detail that costs people an hour: sign out of Windows before switching user accounts. Synology's own advice for Windows is to skip the native client and use RaiDrive, "a drive mapping application that is free for non-commercial use".

The redirector troubleshooting is not repeated here, because it has pages of its own: WebDAV not working on Windows 11 for the deprecated WebClient service, error 0x80070043 and net use error 67 for the two spellings of one failure, the folder you entered does not appear to be valid for the wizard's refusal, and Windows cannot connect to WebDAV for the full checklist.

Connecting from macOS

Both vendors document the same two steps, and macOS is where NAS WebDAV behaves best out of the box.

1. In Finder, choose Go > Connect to Server, or press Cmd+K.
2. Enter the address. Synology's documented example is http://pm.synology.com:5005/; QNAP's is http://172.17.45.155:80/Public, with the share name on the end.
3. Enter your credentials and click Connect.

Synology adds two notes that are easy to miss: "WebDAV supports Bonjour broadcast", and "use HTTPS if your device runs iOS 12 or above".

Connecting from Linux

Synology documents the desktop route as Places > Connect to server, then WebDAV (HTTP) or WebDAV (HTTPS) from the drop-down — that is GVFS, so the same works from GNOME Files with a dav:// or davs:// URL, and from Caja, Nemo and Dolphin. For a shell, Synology names cadaver. For a real filesystem mount, davfs2:

sudo apt-get install davfs2
sudo mount -t davfs https://nas.example.com:5006/ /mnt/nas

Two davfs2 habits worth knowing before blaming the NAS. It caches locally, so a write can look instant while the transfer is still running. And if creating a file returns Resource temporarily unavailable, the documented fix is use_locks 0 in /etc/davfs2/davfs2.conf: the server is not granting the LOCK the client asked for.

Mounting it as a drive instead of fighting the redirector

There is a third option between the native Windows client and a full FUSE driver: let an application talk WebDAV to the NAS over the real network and serve the mount to the operating system from loopback. That is how AnyStorage handles it. WebDAV is one of its connection types, so the NAS is configured once inside the app. For a mounted volume, the app runs its own WebDAV server locally: sidebar, Services, WebDAV tab, Start, default address http://127.0.0.1:3211, Basic authentication always on with username anystorage and a 24-character password generated on first use. Every open connection appears as a folder at that root. No macFUSE, no WinFsp, no admin rights.

Stated plainly: a 0.2.x application, young next to the field. The free tier allows two connections and serves that mount read-only — writing back needs Pro — and permits commercial use. It runs on macOS 11+, Windows 10+ and Ubuntu 20.04+. The broader case is mount cloud storage as a local drive; choosing a WebDAV client is the protocol hub.

Why is my NAS WebDAV slow

Work down this list; the causes sit in different places and only some are on the NAS.

1. A speed limit you set and forgot. Synology's WebDAV Server has per-user and per-group speed limits with optional schedules. Check Speed Limit Settings first: the Result column shows each user's effective limit after individual and group settings combine.
2. The concurrency ceiling. Synology documents a default of 150 concurrent HTTP connections. Twenty clients, a photo app and a backup job can reach it, and past the limit requests queue rather than fail — which feels exactly like a slow disk.
3. Your client, not your NAS. Finder issues several requests per file per folder view, so a few hundred entries cost hundreds of round trips before any content moves. That arithmetic is on why WebDAV is so slow in macOS Finder, and it explains most Synology-is-slow reports from Mac users.
4. Large files dying rather than crawling on Windows. The redirector refuses transfers above FileSizeLimitInBytes, 50,000,000 bytes by default — a hard stop, not slowness: the Windows WebDAV 50 MB limit.
5. HTTPS on a NAS CPU. Synology effectively forces HTTPS for native Windows mapping, and TLS on a low-power NAS is real work. If grep -m 1 '^flags' /proc/cpuinfo on the NAS does not contain aes, encryption is being done the slow way.
6. Two Synology checkboxes that look like slowness. DavDepthInfinity is off by default; with it on, users can "access or delete files without file path length restrictions on client devices", so a stalling recursive delete is worth one look. And Synology recommends a client with UTF-8 support "to avoid encoding errors" — one that mangles non-ASCII filenames produces retries, not an error message.

Next steps

If the NAS end is fine and the desktop end is not: a free WebDAV client for Windows 11, or why WebDAV is slow in macOS Finder. If you came here trying to point a NAS job at a cloud drive, does Google Drive support WebDAV answers that directly.