Note Station — the notes app in DSM

Note Station is the notes app in DSM — Synology’s Evernote replacement. Rich-text notes with attachments, tags, a web clipper, encryption. If you want one, a classic notebook with proper structure.

Starting Note Station

In the DSM main menu → Note Station.

On first launch your note collection is empty. You start with a notebook and your first notes.

Structure

Notes are organized in notebooks:

• A notebook corresponds to a folder (e.g. “Personal”, “Work”, “Travel”)
• Inside: notes with a title and content
• A stack groups several notebooks (e.g. “Club” with the notebooks “Board meetings”, “Member list”, “Events”)

Sidebar on the left: notebook tree. Middle: note list. Right: the active note.

Creating a note

Toolbar → + Note → an empty editor opens.

• Title at the top
• Tags for filtering and search
• Assign a notebook
• Content in the rich-text editor

Rich-text features

• Headings, lists, bullet points
• Bold, italic, underline
• Colors, highlights
• Tables
• Code blocks
• Embedding images, videos, audio

Attachments

Attach a file from storageDRIVE or your local machine. The attachment appears in the note, clickable.

Handy for:

• A “New apartment” note with the rental contract PDF attached
• A “Car insurance” note with the policy attached
• A “Travel” note with the tickets attached

Encrypted notes

Right-click a note → Encrypt. You enter a password. The note is AES-encrypted.

To read it: enter the password.

Important: the password isn’t stored anywhere. If you forget it, the note is gone — we can’t decrypt it either.

Useful for: passwords, PINs, sensitive notes.

Tags

Assign any tags per note. Sidebar → Tags shows all tags, clickable for filtering.

Use cases:

• Status tags (“todo”, “done”)
• Topic tags (“health”, “finances”)
• People tags (“landlord”, “tax-advisor”)

Search

Toolbar → search icon or Ctrl+F.

• Full-text search (including note content)
• Filter by notebook, tag, date, title

Very useful with large note collections.

Web Clipper

A browser extension for Chrome / Firefox / Edge / Safari:

• Visit a web page
• Click the Web Clipper icon
• Note Station → choose a notebook → save

The page is saved to Note Station including images, text and layout. Handy for:

• Recipes
• Travel research
• An article archive

Get the Web Clipper from the Synology repository: in Note Station → Settings → Web Clipper.

Sharing

Right-click a note → Share → a public link with password and expiry date.

The recipient doesn’t need an account — opening the link is enough. In the same menu Note Station also offers “Share with DSM user”. On storageDRIVE that option leads nowhere: your plan has exactly one user account, there are no other users.

Sharing notebooks

Entire notebooks can only be shared with other DSM users — and with one account per plan those don’t exist. Share individual notes via link instead.

If several people with their own logins should work on notes together (family, club), Nextcloud Hosting is the right product: unlimited users, shared storage.

Mobile app

The mobile app is called DS note (Synology’s naming conventions are a bit confusing).

Search for it in the App Store / Google Play.

Works like the browser version:

• Create and edit notes
• Photo straight from the camera as an attachment
• Audio recording as an attachment
• Tags and search

Syncs to your DSM note collection in real time.

Version history

Note Station automatically saves versions of every note.

Open a note → toolbar → History. A list of all versions with date/time. Click a version → preview, restore option.

Offline mode

Mobile app: mark notebooks for offline. They get stored on the phone, readable/editable even without internet. Changes sync on the next online sync.

Import / export

Importing from Evernote

Note Station supports the Evernote export format (.enex).

In Note Station: Settings → Import → Evernote → select the ENEX file.

Notes, attachments and tags come along. The notebook structure is largely preserved.

Exporting from Note Station

Toolbar → Export → choose a format:

• HTML (for reading in a web browser)
• PDF (for print versions)
• ENEX (for migrating back to Evernote)

Note Station vs Synology Drive for notes

Both could hold notes. The difference:

• Note Station: optimized for notes — rich-text editor, tags, web clipper, per-note encryption
• Drive: for file management — if you want Markdown files that are also editable from outside

Our recommendation:

• Quick notes, to-dos, recipes → Note Station
• Structured Markdown documentation, code snippets → Drive with the Text Editor
• Office documents → Drive

Frequently asked questions

How many notes can I have? Technically unlimited. In practice the UI works well up to ~5,000 notes, after that it gets a bit sluggish.

Do attachments count toward the quota? Yes. Note Station attachments count toward your storage usage like all files.

Can I link notes to other apps? Note Station has no direct linking to other DSM apps. But you can paste URLs into notes, e.g. sharing links to Drive files.

Encrypted notes — how secure? AES-256 encryption with your password. As long as you pick a good password, the note is protected against everyone — us included. But: lose the password = lose the note.

Does Note Station work collaboratively like Google Docs? No. Recipients of a sharing link can only read. And if you edit the same note on two of your own devices in parallel, the last save wins.

Does Note Station support Markdown? In a limited way. You can type Markdown syntax, it’s stored as plain text. For real Markdown, better to use the Text Editor in Drive.

What about large attachments — performance? Attachments up to ~50 MB each are smooth. Bigger than that, opening gets slow.

Sync conflicts between the mobile app and the browser? Usually merged cleanly. On colliding edits the last save wins — the old version can be restored from the version history.

What’s next

• Text Editor and PDF Viewer
• Synology Drive in the browser
• Sharing with external people