Unfortunately no one can be told what fun_plug is - you have to see it for yourself.
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Hi everyone,
My wife and I have a couple of Macs and no easy backup solution. We've got a hard drive we backup to and then put away in the bookshelf, but nothing as easy as a NAS box.
My goal is to have something that is easy to set up, always available from our laptops, we can move a lot of files off our Macs onto it, supports our media collection and has redundancy built in.
I've been looking at the various NAS options out there, and the DNS-323 looks like a really nice option, as does the Maxtor Shared Storage II. I've got some questions before I make a decision, and I'm hoping some of you can answer these. I've read some of the threads here, but I'm still not certain enough and D-Link's non-support of Mac users doesn't help!
1 - We need to be able to boot up (or wake from sleep) and have the drives automatically connect. Is this possible?
2 - It looks like the fun_plug can help with OS X filenames (according to rguerra's post here). Do I understand this correctly? Do the instructions here work on the DNS-323?
3 - Our music library is all managed in iTunes, and we'd love to free up the 32GB of space on our Macs (it's over half my entire drive!). I read the review on SmallNetBuilder.com that noted the DNS-323 can serve up iTunes content. Has anyone done this in OS X to multiple Macs, and were there any issues? Is the iTunes library still available as normal files?
4 - I use SuperDuper to back up my Mac. Backing up to a network drive requires the Mac's drive be written out as a sparse drive image. That'll be about 30-60GB in the one file. Can the DNS-323 handle such a large file, or does it fall over at 2GB?
5 - Although the DNS-323 has Gigabit Ethernet, we'd plug it into the wireless router and use it wirelessly. That's only at 802.11g, but we'll go to 802.11n when the hardware drops in price. Apart from the speed difference, has anyone had issues with using wireless connections like this?
Thanks for any help you can give me. I really appreciate it!
This site has already answered many of my other questions and helped me greatly.
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I will recive my macbook tomorrow and then i will start find out how to do backup on it.
Im playing to do some rsync to the dns-323 budt not sure.
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Good luck with it. I'll be interested to hear your impressions.
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Apart form the speed issue I mentioned in a previous post I played with the DNS-323 as iTunes server and that worked seamlessly until now. Just copied the iTunes folder to the NAS and it became visible within iTunes. Only coverart doesn't show up for some reason.
I'm as curious as you for answers on your other questions…
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I am currently using the DNS323 to backup my MacBook Pro (120GB) HDD as well as a WinTel notebook. The DNS works fine with the Mac, but it takes a bit more work to get all the features working (such as the print server). I am using SuperDuper! as my Mac backup utility. I like the fact that it is simple, but can be customized. Interestingly, I have found that for backup up my XP/Parallels environment running on my MBP, it is quicker to use MS Backup from within XP rather than having SuperDuper! backup the files that contain the XP file system. There is a bug in OSX when copying/backing up large files that leads to a crash of the operation or the utility attempting the copy. With SuperDuper! a workaround was discovered that if SuperDuper! is hidden during the process, everything works fine. Apple has indicated the bug should be fixed in the upcoming release of OSX. To do a complete backup of everything except my XP/Parallel environment takes about 6 hours, but the followup "smart" backups which only copy files that have been changed, takes 10-15 minutes.
As for connecting to the DNS wirelessly, it works fine for the print server and for the much smaller "smart" backup, but for a complete, all inclusive backup, connect directly. You will NOT get gigbit speeds as backups are limited by how fast OSX can handle the copy. I was doing well to get 9-10 GB / hour. My MBP is the 2.16GHz Dual Core with 2GB ram, so you can't get much faster. I was also connected via a gigabit switch. The other problem I found when experimenting with wireless backups was that from time to time, OSX would loose the wireless connection, which would of course, abort the backup. I didn't happen every time, but enough, to convince me that for complete backups, wired was the only way to go.
As for file size, I have written out 142GB sparse file as well as several smaller sizes with NO issues. I have also successfully written out 60GB from within XP using MS backup. I am running the latest firmware from D-Link (1.02b).
david
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Thanks David and Hajonides. You've answered most of my questions, and I'm going to order one of these units later today.
My only remaining questions are about the fun_plug making normal OS X filenames possible on the DNS-323, and can we see the drive automatically on boot-up or wake-up?
I really appreciate everyone's help here.
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I have to connect each time I boot up. Either by selecting the "Connect to Server" menu in the Finder or by browsing the Network. By default, the Network won't see the DNS-323, but if you check the SMB option in the Directory Access utility, it'll find it. I haven't been able to make the network connection permanent on startup.
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Found some instructions on how to auto mount the HP Media Vault in OS X which could be applied to the DNS-323 as well: http://wiki.geekgrotto.com/index.php?ti … figuration
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