1) In particular, I am interested if it is possible to restore single files only, or does the entire backup set (possibly) have to be restored?
2) What does the “Alias name” really mean?
3) Can I setup a “mirror” backup that will simply update a previous backup from one NAS to another NAS? – I’d like to backup may 420 NAS #1 with 2GB of data to my 420 NAS #2 and keep in updated on a nightly (or every other night) basis.

If anyone has experience with that, please let me know or send me some pointers.
Thank you!

Remote FTP access via router pinholes and DynamicDNS also works well.

To those having problems on a domain or with lost data – the answer is simple. Don’t use a NAS – Seagate or otherwise – in a domain environment. Do it properly – get a SAN and backup to a replicated iSCSI VTL via a seperate network segment.
RAID is only there for physical disk fault tolerance, and is *not* to be considered a backup solution for data corruption – ALWAYS have backups, and carry out regular test restores. If you lose data then you really only have yourself to blame! Also check the status of the drives WebUI regularly, as you would for any piece of IT equipment.

Has this been user tested at all before shipped?

1) delete a lot of files at once and the Recycle Bin crashes and becomes completely inaccessible space. Your only option is to wipe and start again to get the space and recycle bin back. Actually they now recommend you disable the recycle bin.

2) there’s an option box which doesn’t clarify that it takes what you back up onto it and puts All music files in one directory, renaming where dupes have the same name, All video files in another directory etc. Result is your precious archived stuff is now divorced from your file structure and pretty unusable.

3) ocassionally you can get a Vista problem where it tries to install hardware for the device, fails and then crashes your PC. Very frequently.

4) access performance is slow

Best solution is get something else or if it’s too late takes the disks out and just use them as a RAID array within a PC

I am returning this and going to look for a real NAS device, something NOT from Seagate

Then on day the box just stopped working. None of the domain users could access it and disjoining it and rejoining it to the domain did no longer work. I could log into the web control interface with the local account, but that was it. No access to the data. Big problem!

I then spent over 2 hrs with Seagate on the telephone and did everything they aked me to do to get to get it working. Finally they gave up and told me thae box was toast and too bad, shit happens.

Then I asked them for help in at least trying to save some data off teh drive somehow onto another drive. They said they could do that and transfered me to their data recovery department. But… this department would not help me over the telephone to transfer data to another drive, no…. they wanted me to send in the box and would do a potentially hiughly destructive data recovery operation. They estaimated that my turnaround time would be about 3 weeks and cost would be between $5000-$9000. That pissed me off big time. I bought this NAS as a backup device and that is what they advertize it as. Now that it is not sufficiently working as advertized they want to skin me off thousands of dollars! And they wont even TRY to help me copy over the data first. The ONLY option they give me is the costly destructive slow option! So naturally I decline this “offer”.

After I hand up with Seagate and as I let my hearbeat calm down and take some deep breaths, I start thinking that this is riddiculous. This thing has USB ports and ftp. I hook the box up via USB and see that the directories and data look intact. I realize that trying to copy this much data over USB would be a loon process. I happen to just have built a server the day before with a 8TB array, so I decide to try to FTP teh data over. No problem. Hours later my data is at least safe.w But my blood is boiling, because I realize that SEAGATE never offered to help me with this. Instead they were most happy to jump straight to the “solution” of charging me up to $9000 for data recovery. I also think of all those poor people whose posts I have read on the internet who lost all their data (or at least thought they did) because they never got any support. And what are the chanses that you just happen to have a large storage array available?

I was naturally not happy. So I wrote numerous emails to the sata recovery division epole and asked them to forward my complaint. Some nice soul there apparently did, because some days later I did get a call from Seagate offering to switch out the NAS 440 for a new one. I had to send in the old box, including the drives with the data. OK, I agreed to this. But the switch actually took weeks, and may emails and calls and talking to a lot of people, soem who where authorized and some who where not authorized to say do anything. There were problems at every turn… no we dont ship to your address… no we need a deposit… no we dont talke that credit cards… yada yada yada.

Finally after much testing of the outer limits of human patience I received a new NAS box. As they no longer make the 6TB model they sent a 8 TB model. I had high hopes for this. Guess what…? This new 8TB box is displaying the very same problems as the “old” box. Every few days it looses its abolity to recognize pemissions for users. Seagate had orignally told me that “i had too many users”) (I think I had 19). Now I have only added ONE domain user and IT IS STILL NOT WORKING.

During my epic call with Seagate about the first box, the Seagate tech got at least one thing completely right. It was when she said “You know, these (NAS440) devices aren’t really meant to be used on a network”. Funny of course that they would market a Network Attached Storage box that isn’t supposed to work on a network. But now we know.

By the way. I have tried to join the Seagate forum, because I would rather have vented there and maybe someone at Seagate could have jumped in to offer some solutions. However, when I try to register an account on that forum I just get an error message saying “were having some technical difficulties, try again later”. I have tried again…for weeks. No love.

Seagate is now having big problems with their actual firmware. The read-speed has gone down from nearly 40MB/sec to 10MB/sec after updating!