For a long time, I’ve been using an external USB drive for backups. My thought process is to get a second copy of my important stuff to an “off-machine” drive. My trusty Western Digital Book drive seems to have given up the ghost after about three years.
This time I decided to have a little more fun, I picked up a D-Link DNS-323. Inside this little box is room for two 3.5″ SATA drives. It supports a completely toolless installation. Litterally, you remove the front cover and slide in the drives. There aren’t even any cables. It was very slick.
I should also mention that this is a network device, not a USB device. It supports 10/100/1000 ethernet connections. I also upgraded my switch to gigabit.
Once in, the drives can be setup as individual drives, joined into one larger drive, RAID 0 (stripped), or RAID 1 (mirrored).
I installed two 7,200 RPM 500GB drives and set them up as RAID 1. It took about 5 minutes to format the drives, then I was ready to start loading files.
For my backups, I do a couple of different things. Files that are primarly archival in nature, I use Allway Sync and just sync folder contents between an internal drive and the backup drive. I use this for images and music. For more of the operating system stuff and regular application data, I use WinBackup and do scheduled backups in a more traditional manner (multiple sets, full/incremental, etc). I’m very dissappointed that UniBlue/LIUtilities has decided to retire this application.
I’m impressed with the performance, I copied about 6GB of data to the device in under 20 minutes. This would have been a perty significant project with my USB drive.
There are some interesting features, although I don’t know how much of this I’ll use. For example, it has an FTP server built in. The rational is that you can access it over the Internet to get files remotely. It supports UPnP AV, so it can serve media to other devices. There is an iTunes server. You can connect a USB printer and share it on the network. It can also be configured to automatically download content from a URL or a BitTorrent source.
It comes with Memeo AutoBackup to perform workstation backups, but this only supports the Windows platform. Nothing for Mac or Linux.
So far, I’m pleased. I paid $180 for the device (after rebate) and $70 each for the drives. Total outlay: $320 for a networked 500GB mirrored drive.