4. Features, Continued

Figure 8 shows the "Hardware Settings" page, where I was able to set up some interesting features, including the ability to auto power-on after a power loss. This is a feature I like to see, because it means the system will come right back up after a power blip. This menu also gave me the ability to set the spin-down time for the drive, which means that when the drive is idle, it will shut down to reduce both noise and power consumption.

Figure 8: Hardware Settings Menu

The next option I explored was the "Remote Replication" feature. I assumed that this was a way to back the device up to another network disk, but I soon found otherwise. From the main menu, I entered the info for another NAS on my network, but no matter what I did, I'd get an error, as shown in Figure 9 "(Status: Remote destination path does not exist)".

Figure 9: Replication Menu with Remote Host Test Failure

Turning to the manual, I found that this feature was really designed to back up one TS-101 to another. Since I only had a single TS-101 on my LAN, I moved on.

The TS-101 also has a built-in FTP server. Figure 10 shows the configuration page, where the server can be disabled or set to a non-standard port.

Figure 10: FTP setup menu

The TS-101 provides a web interface that allows you to access your files remotely using a web browser (see Figure 11).

Figure 11: Web Interface to file system

The next couple of features I'll touch on are network backup and USB backup. For network backup, Qnap provides a Windows-only backup utility that allows you to copy data from your Windows system to a share on the TS-101. Figure 12 shows the main interface of the utility.

Figure 12: Backup Utility

Unfortunately, despite a number of attempts, the utility was never able to log into my TS-101 - even though I could interactively access the TS-101 myself under Windows using the same parameters.

The other backup utility that the TS-101 provides is "USB Copy". The idea here is that you plug a USB disk device such as a thumb drive or an external disk into the front panel USB port, and then press the "Copy" button. My test of this worked well, with the exception that there was no visible indication that the copy was finished, so I didn't know when I could remove my USB thumb-drive. Once the operation was complete, I found my copy in a new dated directory underneath the shared "USB" folder.