7. Print Serving And Backup

As stated earlier, the N2100 also has the ability to act as a print server for the network. Each computer on the network that needs to use the printer has to have a driver installed that is specific to the printer plugged into the N2100, which is then configured as a network printer. Figure 10 shows the printer status window after I plugged a printer into one of the USB ports.

Figure 10: Printer Information

One last feature I checked out was "one button copy", which is designed to give you a quick way to back up a USB device. For my test, I plugged a FAT32-formatted USB drive into the front USB port and then pressed the copy button just above it. After a beep and a short wait, my data was available in a time-stamped subdirectory of a "usbcopy" directory. This seemed to work well and would be a handy way to move data around.

I should also note that the box has the ability to create "photo albums" from your photographs, but it didn't seem to work for me. I placed a number of JPEG and PNG files in the top-level Album directory, but when I brought up the Gallery Web page, none of my pictures were present.

Many NAS devices include backup software, but Thecus instead gave directions on how to use a standard Windows backup utility, and directed Apple users to several on-line packages that are compatible with the N2100. The lack of either a bundled software backup application or built-in backup capabilities is an important omission that I hope Thecus corrects at some point.