Backups. How I hate worrying about backups. Backing up your computer data is about as exciting as watching the San Antonio Spurs play basketball but if you dont do it, you will regret it eventually.

Part of me has been looking at totally remote solutions where all my data is on someone else's machines. Google Apps is a great solution for this and I may give dotMac another shot this year. Another part of me has been trying to centralize data at home so that instead of backing up a bunch of individual PC's, I just back up the server and access the data on it with our personal computers.

At home, we have tried all kinds of solutions for this personal computer/server/backups setup. Sadly none of them have really worked that well. We have two personal computers and a large library of music/photos/videos to backup as well as a mix of Windows XP and Mac OSX systems. It is a pain.

A few years ago, I built a file server running linux with a RAID 1 card and 2 drives but it was noisy and large. Then I tried to build a solution using Apple's Airport Extreme with a USB drive but it was too slow and did not provide any data protection without RAID drives.

In June of 2007, I tried another solution and we have been living with it for the past year. Instead of another file-server, I bought a tiny dedicated piece of hardware that is designed solely for providing storage on a network, also called Network Attached Storage (NAS).

The product is called the DNS-323 by D-Link. Basically it is a tiny enclosure that fits 2 SATA drives and a (loud) fan and includes a super low power, (limited) linux server. You insert two SATA drives of your choice, connect the box to your ethernet and use some simple web-based control software to configure it. It shows up on your network using SAMBA so it works with both Windows and Mac OS.

For about $300, this device promised to be cheaper and a lot easier to use than a dedication server and more functional than the AirportExtreme+USB drive solution.

A NAS solution provides a central place to back up data and to share data. It also provides protection from hard drive crashes by using RAID 1 - two drives that are mirror copies of each other. It is low power, small and quiet. If your needs are simple, the DNS-323 is the perfect home file server solution.

Initial Impressions

It was tricky to configure from my Mac without using the Windows software but I muddled through. (And noticed that even the PC software does not work properly if you use something other than WORKGROUP as your workgroup.)

I was excited about the iTunes server, until I tried it. Although it was very easy to get set up and all our computers found it immediately, the server is limited. One, it does not allow the fancy album-art viewing mode that iTunes now supports. Two, it does not seem to allow playlists. The later issue a critical problem for us so I will not be using the iTunes server and instead have our local iTunes programs mount the drive for music.

Performance was acceptable but not amazing, especially with wireless.

A year later

At this point, the only thing we use the box for is a location to backup files to. It is basically a slow file server. I gave up on trying to use it as a printer server. I periodically try (and give up) on trying to use it as a media server with my HTPC (Windows XP) or PS3.

A regular problem is that the device falls off our Mac network. I dont know if this is a MacOS problem or a DNS-323 problem but it is a major pain. If the drive does not show up in the Finder, good luck. Eventually I figured out a way to find it with the "Connect To Sever" dialog and the totally cryptic command: "cifs://purplevision;keith@dlink-nas/". When it does connect, the drive name is fixed and unchangeable.

The DNS-323 is not an iTunes solution for our music. It is also not a solution for video. After buying a PS3, I began to desire the ability to store movies on a large drive and then watch them on the PS3.

I was particularly disappointed to find that the PS3-to-DNS-323 did not work at all even though both products call themselves "media servers". Although the PS3 could see the DNS-323, it could not access files on it at all because of DLNA errors. At that point, I tried to figure out what DLNA was and I was forced to test the waters of tech-stuff no normal human-being should have to. Using Google, I found a bootleg BIOS for the DNS-323 in Germany and I updated it. The situation improved but still is not a usable solution.

In the process of BIOS troubleshooting, I found a whole community of hackers that get the linux part of the little DNS-323 to do all kinds of things. Sadly this is beyond my abilities and way beyond my desire to spend time on it.

There is now a even newer official version of the BIOS from D-Link (1.05) but the big giant warnings from D-Link that updating my cause your drives to be unreadable has prevented me from trying it.

Closing

Although we have been using the DNS-323 for a year now, I have never been totally thrilled with it. It works but is limited in a number of ways. Recently I have been hearing about another product called Drobo which has me curious.

If you are looking for a simple file server with RAID1 protection from drive failures, I can recommend this product. Especially if you dont have the $bucks$ for the Drobo. If you want a real media server, as I do, then I would suggest more research.