Synology Cube Station CS407 - Do-It-Yourself NAS
Synology Assistant, Data Replicator II, and Download Re-Director
The CS407 is driven by the all-mighty "wizard" approach for a number of its feature and to put it simply, it just works. Synology Assistant is a wizard utility for configuring and auto-mapping network drives from the unit's available volumes, as well as a host of other features. The software runs via an installation on a network client and the interface provides network discovery of the system as well as managerial functions for things like print server functionality.
Synology's Data Replicator II software is extremely easy to setup, again with auto-discovery of the system on the network, as well as its available network shares.
Users can choose from three options of backup for any system the software is installed on that is on the network; Immediate Backup, Synchronization and scheduled backup. We were very pleased to see the synchronization option for incremental backup functionality and of course scheduled backup as a bare minimum requirement is available as well. All told, Data Replicator II offers all the backup functionality a SOHO or Home user could want in a backup package and it worked flawlessly for us.
Synology's Download Redirector provides easily configurable automatic download and file management functions to direct the CS407 to connect to an external server or site and fetch any file of your choice. You can even drag and drop a download link to the target area of Download Redirector's window and it will automatically fetch the target file(s) from that link. This functionality is limited to Windows users only but it sure was slick to see it in action.
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Download Redirector saves bandwidth for your client machines as well, since the CS407 is actually performing the download with this service, rather than having to download a file to a client and then dumping it to the NAS volume.
