Newbie Synology NAS user here

Hi Bart

Your experience has that ring of familiarity to it.  I ended up letting the verification process run overnight, then revisited it the next morning once it was done.

Initiall set up can take up to a day or more. Be patient. And make sure you have a back up stratagy

Hi Bart

After many weeks deliberating and even asking a few opinions on the forum I also have gone for the Synology 212J, with WD Caviar Green!  Great minds and all that.  Just ordered yesterday so am looking forward to many frustrating days trying to understand it and set it up when it arrives.  I deliberated over going for the 212+ but this seems very much aimed at business/office use so thought it a bit overkill for my domestic requirements. 

I've made my way through a lot of the setup, and can finally connect to it via os x finder (finder, in the most abbreviated view mode, does not show the "connect" button and I was pulling my hair out 'til I realized that!). 

But my uServe still doesn't see the DiskStation and I've got no idea what's wrong   Both the uServe and the DiskStation are plugged into my Airport Extreme, and both have ip addresses that I can browse to via my home computers.  But the uServe doesn't see the nas as a possible network share   Nor can I figure out how to select it as a backup device for the uServe, either via the web interface or the DTC on my windows laptop.

This networking stuff is not for me

Wow what a tortured path to get this done.  Thankfully, by brute-force searching every post ever made on the topic I figured out which settings needed to be changed.  I'm now the proud owner of music-on-the-NAS.

The Synology 212j is very quiet and non-obtrusive. 

I'm not tech-savy either, and I can tell you that just getting the 212j assembled on "online" on the home network was very very easy.  The settings that finally gave access to the uServe were to change the workgroup name for the NAS from "workgroup" to "NAIM," and to turn off the internal music server that will send music to your iPhone -- apparently that's another form of music service that renders the shared folders that contain music inaccessible to the network.  I had read both . . . somewhere.

Once the names of my music-containing folders started to show up as network shares, it still took a few minutes for the uServe to find them all, and scan the contents.

I still haven't figured out how, using the web interface, to do a backup.  (I 'promoted' a share to a backup store but am stuck there.)  I'm also not sure why I'm not seeing some album art even tho it's in a file named folder.jpg in the right folders. 

Once stuff works, it does integrate very well into the nServe app.  Just some arm-wrestling to get there.

Bart,

I am pretty sure that to configure US to back up to the NAS, you need to use the Naim Desktop Client. Don't think this can be done by twe web interface to the US.

I also have US + Synology NAS, and like you have struggled, but now it is all set up and works. Until I bought the NAS I hadn't realized that is effectively a b-----y huge storage device wibasic it's own very basic operating system. Takes me back to computing in the 1970s - get a a decimal point in wrong Colum and nothing runs.

Cheers, Paul

Thanks Paul -- remembering to bring home my pc laptop and trying from the DTC was Plan B.

I too am old enough to have done some "computer programming" in the 1970's -- HP Timeshare Basic, and fortran on punch cards.  The uServe manual says:

"Note: The default UnitiServe daily backup schedule is
automatically implemented as soon as a backup location
is added. The backup schedule can only be modified via
the Naim Desktop Client PC application."

Maybe when I get home this evening it will have backed itself up

It's amazing (probably not really to networking folks) how there are so many settings and options, and any one can %$&@ the whole thing up.  I have to tell you I felt like I'd conquered the world when all of a sudden I saw the Diskstation folders start to show up in the Manage Network Shares web interface!

Indeed Bart,

Couldnt agree more. It's like a massive sigh of relief wa tailings actually perform as intended. The latest wind up for me was when the US couldn't back up to the NAS, having been doing so perfectly for several moths. It turns out that the reason what that in the intervening period, I has changed Internet provider and ADSL modem. This caused all sorts of ip settings to change, and it no longer worked. I would never have guessed this.

Many thanks to Phil Harris, great service as ever to sort it out for me, it now works fine again.

Cheers, Paul

True to what the user guide says, once I'd designated a backup store via the web interface, the darned thing backed itself up to my NAS without me having done anything else.  I came home this evening to find my entire uServe backed up to my NAS.  Brilliant.

Keep in mind, you do need another backup. Just having two drives in the NAS isn't backup enough. I learnt this the hard way: The NAS fell from it's shelf, and both hard drives in it became unoperable. Luckily for me, this was with brand new drives, so no data loss.

Apart from that, if you bought both hard drives new, their lifetime will be about the same, so they could both very well die around the same time.

Thanks for this.  I'm still doing my backups to my TimeCapsule too!