I have only spent an hour or so checking out the EX4. I had hopes that after trying Seagate Business Storage NAS and running into so many issues, WD may have a NAS solution that works.
Although the EX4 seems to be of higher quality in both hardware and software over that last NAS I fought with for a week to work, I have already run into some issues. I have only explored one important area to me so far re: getting data on to the NAS from external USB drives.
On USB to NAS backups:
I can not schedule these backups.
I can only select 1 folder at a time to backup - not multiple folders.
Backups create a folder with a time stamp in the destination folder.
Backup progress indicator shoots to 96% complete in less than a minute and apparently stays there until back has completed giving no real indication of percent complete. Current backup has been running for an hour at 96% complete now.
I see that I can schedule internal backups, but apparently I can not access the USB drives for internal backups.
Please tell me that maybe I have not spent enough time to figure out how to transfer multiple folders (at the same level) from an external drive to the NAS and without the NAS on its own creating a time stamp folder. And please tell me that I can schedule these backups as I can apparently do with “internal” backups. And I am not getting how an internal backup to the same device is useful. And why wasn’t the USB-NAS backup included in the job scheduler as apparently the useless internal backup was?
Also, I can only encrypt at the volume level, not the share level. And to encrypt the volume, I have to change the RAID mode? And how do I set permissions on a USB drive attached to the NAS?
There appears to be some nice features included but maybe at the expense of some very basic and required capabilities being overlooked.
And please explain to me the idea of an internal backup. That one is really bugging me.
Hello Ichigo - Thanks for the reply. Nice to get a quick response and know that WD is monitoring this forum. I will submit the most important ideas/issues to the ideas board. There is one glaring show-stopper for me at the moment…
USB shares are always public and accessible to everyone. This will not work for me and probably for most people, I would think. I read that the previous generation/version of WD NAS did allow making USB shares private. Seems like a big oversight to leave this required feature out of the current version. It does make it unusable as a share. I would like to give family and friends access to the NAS but not if my personal and business data are completely public. I could this feature be left out?
Another potential show-stopper is the inability to copy selected folders to the NAS. If a folder has 2TB of data but I only need a subset of the data under the folder, I would need to copy the entire 2TB (if I have the available space) and then delete the data off the NAS that I did not want copied over. I simple quick copy of data would take days instead of minutes. And I have found that large copy jobs often fail.
I will add these issues to the idea forum and hope for some indication that they will be addressed soon. Unfortunately, I really need a reliable and usable NAS soon, so I may need to look for another solution. Not sure how soon the next firmware release is scheduled.
I noticed too that the backup feature is something to be desired. No way to schedule an autobackp to a USB unit. It also looks like you can only pick one share for one backup job, you can’t backup up the whole NAS unit in one backup job.
We also had the Seagate unit, got it RMA’d and that unit wasn’t any better and it sitting here to be sent back for credit. The backup procedure was great (when it worked).
I was pleased that EX4 has a Windows domain authentication option - sounds like a step above home user unit - it might not be a Enterprise unit but the cost and features allows it to fall in the SOHO / SMB business arena.
I will jump over to the other forum and add my 2 cents worth about “new / missed” features in the backup area.
