Synology Disk Station 211J Setup Part 2

As promised in my earlier post it is time for part two of my Synology DiskStation 211J setup review, continuing on from where I left off my next thing to do was setup shared folders so that, among other things, I could use Media Rover for backing up and syncing iTunes between my desktop and laptop.

I attacked this the same way that I usually attack these things, poking around in the control panel and seeing what jumped out at me. I suppose I should start with the interface actually, once you have everything setup with the Synology Assistant as I mentioned in part 1 the rest of the administration is done via a snappy web interface. It feels like a simplified linux desktop, which is exactly what it is really, just on a web page. There are four main icons, the file browser, control panel, help and quick start, which just links you to things in the control panel.

I started by setting up a shared folder, just opened up the control panel, selected shared folder and followed the prompts. Then I ran off to try and play with the Media Rover setup. Unfortunately while it did allow me to setup a shared drive I couldn't access it properly, I hadn't even given it thought but I forgot to setup a user, I just set everyone to read only. But then I couldn't access it with the guest account and it seemed stupid to use the admin account.

So back in the control panel I added a user, again just following the obvious prompts from the control panel, and tried to assign permissions to the folder I created. I thought I did it properly but then from my PC I couldn't access it. At this stage I figured I might as well just make a new shared folder and assign the user properly from the outset, that worked straight away. So I guess the lesson from me here is to add your users before you try and do anything else really. The new folder worked perfectly (although the old one hung around on the Windows PC till it was restarted, I couldn't access it but it was still there) and I was able to setup Media Rover and have it sync across to the NAS with out a fuss. You can read more about the Media Rover setup over here ... when I finish the post that is.

My next step was to install and configure the Windows backup tool, Data Replicator 3, on my desktop PC. Installation was a breeze, run it off the disk and you're away in about ten seconds it was all done. Configuration was a matter of selecting a shared folder on the NAS, selecting which files I wanted to back up and clicking go, very straightforward really, at least to do the initial backup. With approximately 55 Gb of data the initial back will take around 4 hours or so, well that's what it told me anyway, but it did go a little quicker than its progress bar would have had me believe.

I also wanted to setup the Time Machine Backup from the Power Book, I had to add another Shared Folder and then in the Win/Mac/NFS setup, under Mac File Service its a simple matter of selecting which shared folder you would like to use, in my case the ingeniously named "TimeMachine" folder. Somewhat annoyingly selecting a folder requires that you restart the network service on the NAS which I would have to wait to do as I am still replicating the Desktop PC. Once I applied the settings my Powerbook quickly picked up the new "TimeMachine" folder on the drive and it was a simple matter of clicking start to get it all working.

I grabbed a power meter from Aldi the other day so I thought I would put it to use monitoring the power draw of the NAS. On power up it power usage peaked at 24 Watts and then settled back to around 15 W when the drives where spinning but nothing else was happening. When copying an individual large file power usage spiked to 16.5 W, when completely idle and no drives running the power draw dropped to 7 W.

In terms of transfer speeds I can't be bothered sitting down and calculating heaps of them, although I am sure a lot of you are interested in that. A 1.28 Gb file transfered comfortably in around 3 minutes and a 55 Gb backup of my Windows PC via the data replicator took 2 hours and 45 minutes to complete. Not the most scientific but I rate it plenty quick enough for me.

I have to rearrange a cupboard to get the system setup in its permanent position and when it is in there I will get it backed up to the external disk as well, the Story Station.

EDIT: I've now got the external drive connected and backing up, you can read the setup info in my new post.