Anybody using the Buffalo Terastation (or similar)?

Question

Anybody using the Buffalo Terastation (or similar)?

Is anybody using the Buffalo Terastation as a NAS or Backup drive?

I'm looking into getting some external RAID storage for backups and such, and the Terastation looks really good and you can't beat the price.

The biggest problem I see is that apparently the Terastatio is only accessible as a windows share or an ftp server which wouldn't work for backups.
If I wanted to use Retrospect to do my backups I could only create backup jobs up to 2Gb only. If I wanted to use another backup software (SilverKeep, for example) all ownership and security permissions would get lost.

So, is anybody using the Terastation successfully, or is there an alternative out there with similar characteristics and price?

Thanks for your help,
Julian

Dual 2.7 GHz PowerPC G5, Mac OS X (10.4.3), 2.5 Gb RAM

Posted on Nov 26, 2005 7:49 AM

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Answer 1

Nov 26, 2005 8:48 AM in response to Julian Sanchez

You've probably already done your research and looked into MediaBank, but just in case you haven't.

Just something I've been considering.

Lee C
"The early bird may get the worm but the second mouse gets the cheese." -- Willie Nelson
See the article Backup::Restore.

Dual 2.5 Power Mac G5 Mac OS X (10.4.3)

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Answer 2

Nov 26, 2005 9:14 AM in response to Lee Cullens

Lee,

Actually I had not come across MediaBank before. I'm glad you mentioned it to me. Interesting that all my web searches have not returned this before. Thanks!!!

Regards,
Julian

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Answer 3

Nov 26, 2005 12:23 PM in response to Julian Sanchez

I've been in no hurry because I had already invested in a number of externals for alternating cloning, but I've been seriously considering this alternate approach for the next hardware go-around.

I'd be very interested in whatever you end up doing and how it works out. If this thread is too old by then, see the article in my sig for a contact.

Lee C
"The early bird may get the worm but the second mouse gets the cheese." -- Willie Nelson
See the article Backup::Restore.

Dual 2.5 Power Mac G5 Mac OS X (10.4.3)

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Answer 4

odysseus

Level 3

948 points

Nov 26, 2005 12:47 PM in response to Julian Sanchez

ftp does work for Retrospect backups -- my wife and I use Retrospect this way all the time with our Buffalo Linkstation NAS. And it stores data in 16 MB chunks, so you won't run into a 2 GB max per file limit (which I doubt is imposed by the Windows SMB, so I'm not sure where you're getting that limitation).

So the Terastation doesn't run Netatalk, the open source version of AppleTalk? I updated Netatalk 1.6.4 to 2.0.3 on my Linkstation (a much cheaper version of the Terastation, and so I now use my Linkstation for very large backups.

There's a very active Yahoo group devoted to the Linkstation; the same is probably the same for the Terrastation.

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Answer 5

Nov 26, 2005 1:37 PM in response to odysseus

Odysseus,

I have a Windows computer as well as a Linux computer at home. If I mount the windows hard drive through SMB, and the Linux hard drive through NFS, in both situations Retrospect will complain whenever I'm trying to backup more than 2Gb. The log will even say that the limit is 2Gb.

The odd thing is that I have FTP enabled on both the Windows and Linux computers. I've tested it manually and it works fine. However Retrospect will not be able to create the backup archive through FTP.

I looked at the Terastation box earlier today at Fry's, and it does say that it supports AppleTalk. However Buffalo's website specifically says that it supports Windows shares and FTP.

I will check the Yahoo groups. I had no idea there was one. Thanks so much for the information.

Regards,
Julian

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Answer 6

Nov 26, 2005 10:30 PM in response to Julian Sanchez

I'm not sure that there's a good solution to this problem, but one that probably isn't is the Western Digital NetCenter external drive, which I have. It's an ethernet-connected drive that runs "Windows NT server 4.9". According to the Western Digital support site, it "uses a proprietary file system and cannot be reformatted as FAT32, NTFS, or a Macintosh File System". The drive can be password-protected, but that feature doesn't work with Tiger. If you want to reach the drive at all, your data has to be unprotected (verified with WD support).

For a Windows network, it might be fine, but it's not a great choice with Tiger.

I would love to know if there's a better one myself.

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Answer 7

Nov 26, 2005 10:54 PM in response to John Fallon

John,

From what I've been looking at on the internet it appears that the only way to be sure is by buying a used G4 (or a new G5 if you have the money) and create a RAID inside it so you can share it with the rest of the Macs on your network. Any other approach (RAID-related of course) seems flawed.

Thanks for sharing your experiences with the Western Digital NetCenter. Hopefully we will be able to get a good solution out of this thread...eventually 😉

Regards,
Julian

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Answer 8

Jan 31, 2006 8:50 PM in response to Julian Sanchez

The Buffalo Terastation is clearly not a good recommendation. In doing research about this topic I came across the X-RAID device (sorry, don't have a link handy right now), which does support Macs and Windows with no limitations in file size. The RAID mechanism also provides a way for users to add new hard drives and increase the hard drive size without having to do any special configuration.

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