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I have been running Time Machine backups as described in my tutorial for more than a week.

In the Apple forums there have been discussions that the above method does not work. However:

• Backups via Time Machine to a NAS DO work. It will not work properly if you do not backup inside of a sparsebundle.
• A bug (which got fixed in OSX 10.5.4) prevented Time Machine not to purge old backups and resize the sparsebundle. This is now working properly and I could confirm it in the OS X console.
• When a sparsebundle is created with fixed size and a quota is applied on your NAS, Time Machine will purge old backups to make the latest backup fit within the provided quota
• OS X introduced additional AFP functions 4C (for Spotlight), 4E (directory sync for TimeMachine) and 4F (file sync for TimeMachine) and the NetTalk protocol implemented on any NAS does not support this. The lack of those functions however does not affect your backups.

So I got this 1 terabyte beauty of network storage where I can stream high-definition video onto my TV (at a gorgeous 5MB/sec videorate) and suffered on the weekend the first power-outage.

Although it was a self-induced incident (lesson learned: turning off the circuit-breaker switches everything off in the house), it brought back the reality, that with Eskom's "guaranteed" services and the risk of cable-theft it would be only a matter of time until the diskstation would suffer an outage. Unthinkable what could happen when 1 terabyte of storage with read-heads flying at 7200RPM over the disk-surface come to a grinding halt in the middle of file-operations.

I was in dire need of a reliable UPS - such as the Back-UPS CS 350 from APC.

The Synology DiskStation makes it actually quite easy for you: You install the UPS, connect it via the USB cable to the diskstation, and it will automatically configure the UPS:

With a complete power-failure, I will be able to continue operating the NAS for another 80 minutes. I did however configure it to shutdown after 30 minutes.

Major thanks go to: Riaan Strydom (Skype: riaan.rks) from RKS Computer Solutions. I was able to order the UPS on a Monday morning and had it delivered within 5 hours the same day. I had tried to source an APC UPS for 4 days, and no other company had stock or did not even bother to respond. Well done Riaan - excellent customer service!!

Get it from here.

Fixes include:

• Added finding partial street names to Find Address
• Updated city search to work for 'City, State' queries
• Fixed issue where some route calculations could hang interminably
• Fixed 'Displaying results within...' string not updating for empty find results
• Fixed crashes that could happen while importing from a file or receiving from a device
• Fixed routes received from some devices causing crashes
• Fixed various find crashes

This at least works with the Synology products - in my case with the DS107+. This tip solves two problems for any mac-user - SSH access directly to the NAS as well as ensuring that Bonjour advertises the shares into your Finder-window. The only draw-back is, that your DiskStation requires the iTunes-server to run (not a problem in my scenario though):

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As the DS107+ is a single-bay NAS there is no option for raid. To have proper redundancy you need at least a 4-bay (preferably 5-bay for appropriate speed) NAS-device - which costs a small fortune. With a single-bay NAS you are also caught between a rock and a hard place:

Today's hard drives have a built-in capability called "sector remapping" which will remap (or repair) the defective sector with a backup supply of sectors. This process is seamless to the user and it doesn't require user intervention. However, if there are several defective sectors, the hard disk can time out while attempting to remap multiple defective sectors, which can result in the computing device that the hard disk is failing to respond correctly, or it can lead to other difficulties, such as communicating or retrieving data from the hard disk. And this was exactly what happened on my NAS - nothing wrong with the drive or the NAS.

Any desktop-class hard-drive will only remap bad sectors as they are detected. This can cause massive delays (in the extend of 10 seconds to several minutes per sector) when remapping sectors. Using Enterprise-Class disks can usually avoid this error, as most Enterprise-Class disks are designed to remap a defective sector under ten seconds (instead of several minutes with Desktop-Class).

Using Enterprise-Class disks in a single-disk system may result in loss of data with regards to sector remapping. And therefore It is not recommended to use Enterprise-Class disks for a Single-disk system/application.

Originally I had initialised my desktop-class harddrive (a 1TB WD Caviar @ 3Gb/sec) through OS X and was still amazed how quickly the drive was initialised - WRONG.

After some time I realised that the drive started to "flake" out, as it was busy remapping bad-sectors (which is normal in any drive, and there is virtually no drive which does not have bad sectors).

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