My LinkStation is running beautifully with the new firmware and NFS is especially nice, since it’s a lot faster than SMB, doesn’t have the long filename problems of AFP, and will remount after my powerbook wakes up from sleep.
The one problem I had with it is their built-in backup is very slow and unreliable. I also find that it often fails and leaves the disk write protected. Since my external USB backup drive is smaller than the 250G internal drive, at some point I’ll run out of space for backing up. I find that backing up to a gzipped tar archive solves both problems. It’s fairly easy to do by editing the crontab and replacing the do-backup.pl item with a tar command. I added the following commands using ‘crontab -e’:
15 2 * * Sat tar czf /mnt/usbdisk1/Backups/bkup-`date -I`.tgz /mnt/hda/share
25 3 1,15 * * find /mnt/usbdisk1/Backups/ -ctime 15 -exec rm -f {} \;
This creates a dated backup every Friday night/Saturday morning at 2:15 AM. The second command runs twice a month and deletes any backups more than two weeks old, to prevent it from filling up the drive.