DSM Mac OS Feature Questions

[tbutler@ofb.biz]

I'm still NAS shopping, and the Iomega unit that I almost bought because it was such a good deal is now sold out, so I'm back to considering a Synology unit. I had a few questioned I had inquired about over on the Synology forums, but wasn't able to get a response, so I thought I'd bug the helpful folks over here again. Thanks for any insight you can provide!

1.) Synology's wiki refers to AFP as a legacy protocol and in DSM, it refers to AFP as "AppleTalk." There is also a suggestion that Mac OS X's most common file sharing protocol is SMB. These things do not instill confidence for me in picking a Synology unit, since AFP is not legacy (it is the default file sharing protocol on Macs!), AFP is not synonymous with AppleTalk and SMB is not the default protocol. Is the actual implementation reliable? I'm not trying to sound nitpicky, I just worry when the documentation and labeling in a product seems flakey that the actual implementation may be flakey too.

2.) Does DSM support Bonjour so that its AFP shares will show up automatically in Finder?

3.) When using Time Machine with the unit, does one have to set aside a certain amount of space ahead of time on the DiskStation, or can the Time Machine image "grow" over time, as needed?

 

[Coruscant]

Afp & os x

The Synology Time Machine implementation requires AFP. However, you can access the unit through any of the protocols supported by OS X, which includes SMB, AFP, FTP, etc. The only hiccup I've had, which is pretty major and I'm trying figure out a way to mitigate the problem, is corruption of the Time Machine backup if there is a power outage during backup. I haven't determined conclusively if the corruption was entirely attributable to the power outage or to Spotlight indexing of the Time Machines files.

All the share will show up, but the connection still needs to be logged into.

The recommended usage of Time Machine is to assign a quota to a Time Machine account on the NAS.