- Average user rating: 2.5 stars out of 39 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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16 out of 16 people found this review helpful
2.0 stars
"Backups don't work as advertised"
Pros: good price, solid performance, no long waits for tech support
Cons: not so user friendly interface, back ups to USB drive don't work
Summary: If you are buying this as a media hub to store large files then forget it. The backup feature will work only as long as the attached USB2 HD has enough space for a full backup (incremental does not work). Tech support claims the incremental backup not working is a "known issue" but have offered no solution other than "we suggest purchasing a third party backup program." Gee, thanks.
The only way around this issue without buying a third party program is to reformat the USB drive ever one or 2 times you do a backup. Tedious.
And using a third party solution with this setup? Not good at all. You see, when a network drive like the Linkstation backups directly to the USB2 drive it takes about 3 hours for 78GB of data because there is no need for the data to be sent across the network. Once you start using third party software, however, your bandwidth gets bottlenecked by the ethernet connection (and it must travel back to the linkstation and on to the daisy chained USB2 drive so you are looking at maybe 1/8-1/12 the performance of USB2 speeds). The same 78 GB then takes a whopping 37 hours! (with data verification turned on). If you fill this thing up and need to backup it up you might as well leave for a weeks vacation because that will be how long your file server will be out of commission during backups.
One if you need to share files on a network then you are also going need to backup those file. The Linkstation is a great, inexpensive files server/print server. Its fails miserably in its backup functions.
Where to buy
Buffalo LinkStation 250GB:
$124.95
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Amazon.com Marketplace
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$124.95 | Yes |
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