QNAP TS-119 Turbo NAS Review

by Shawn Oliver — Tuesday, June 09, 2009, 12:00 PM EDT

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Backups

One feature that almost every NAS buyer looks forward to using is automatic backup. Be a consumer with multiple PCs in the house, a small business owner with priceless records on file or a web company with critical back-end files to keep track of, everyone can benefit from regularly scheduled backups. QNAP recognizes this fact, and its Web interface tool has a dedicated section for tweaking and scheduling backups to fit your needs. Compared to Maxtor's Central Axis Business Edition NAS service, the TS-119 Turbo NAS is a bit lacking on the backup front, but it definitely has the basics down pat.

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The central "Backup" hub -- shown above -- has three main portals: External Drive, USB One Touch Copy and Remote Replication. The External Drive option leads you to the panel shown below, where you can select which folders (or all of them) within your NAS to backup, which external storage device will act as the recipient of your backups, a backup method and a copy option. As for backup methods, you can select from 'Do not backup,' 'Backup now,' 'Schedule Backup' and 'Auto-backup.' As the title implies, 'Backup now' begins backing up your selected folders immediately as you click 'Apply,' whereas 'Schedule backup,' enables you to pick the day(s) and time to backup your selected folders. 'Auto-backup' begins backing up your selected folders just as soon as an external storage device is connected. As for 'Copy options,' you've got two choices: 1) 'Copy' -- which simply backs up everything to the destination drive in a new save file and 2) 'Synchronize' -- which deletes the previous backup and just synchronizes with the HDDs current data.

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The 'USB One Touch Copy' section provides a few options that are similar to those mentioned above, but rather than copying files over to a selected storage location at a given time, this points your given folders to copy to whatever HDD you connect to the front panel USB port. In other words, this option is more for "one-time" backup needs, while the scheduled backup section is more of a "nightly / weekly" thing -- something you'll do on a regular basis.

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Finally, there's the 'Remote Replication' option. By using this function, you can back up the data on the local server to a remote server of the same NAS series, and also allow backup from remote server to the local server. Few options are given here, with just a Port Number cell accompanying check-able boxes for "Enable backup from a remote server to the local host" and "Allow remote Rsync server to back up data to NAS."