Home services

Five things almost everybody pays for elsewhere —or half-solves with a laptop left switched on— and that fit comfortably in the machine already running at home.

Downloads

The "Downloads" app on the desktop.

You paste an http/https/ftp link, a magnet, or drop a .torrent file on the window, and the NAS downloads it on its own into the shared folder you choose. You can close the panel and switch off the machine you asked from: the one downloading is the NAS.

• It survives a power cut: what was downloading is written to disk every thirty seconds, so a blackout costs half a minute of download, not the whole download.
• Five settings and not one more: where it is saved, how many at a time, download limit, upload limit and whether torrents keep seeding. The NAS decides the rest.
• It tells you when it finishes through whichever notification channels you set up. That is the only reason anyone leaves something downloading.
• What comes down lands inside a shared folder, with that folder's group and permissions: it is visible from Windows, the Mac or the phone without touching anything.

Choosing the folder is mandatory

Until you choose where things are saved, downloads do not turn on. It is not a whim: pulling 40 GB onto the system disk is the fastest way to leave the NAS out of space.

About torrents

The NAS opens a port (6881, TCP and UDP) in its firewall so other peers can reach it. Without it torrents still download, but more slowly. You do not have to open anything on the router for it to work; opening it only improves the speed.

If you turn off "keep seeding", the torrent stops as soon as it finishes downloading. Many private trackers forbid that: check their rules first.

Media server (DLNA)

Control Panel → File services → DLNA.

The TV, the console or the living-room player find the NAS by themselves and play whatever is in the folders you choose. Nothing has to be installed on the TV.

• It serves the file as is, without re-encoding: it works on a 2015 television and uses no processor. If you are after cover art, users and on-the-fly conversion, install Jellyfin or Plex from the Package Centre; this does not compete with them.
• What you copy shows up on its own. If something does not appear (you copied it with the service stopped, or a bulk copy flooded the file system notification), press "Rescan": that is the only thing you need to know how to do here.
• Only shared folders are published, so what is seen on the TV is the same thing that is seen from Windows or the phone.

No password. DLNA does not have one: anybody on your network sees those folders. Do not publish anything there you would not want seen by everyone who connects to your wifi (guests included).

Calendar and contacts

Control Panel → Calendar and contacts.

The phone's calendar and address book, synced against the NAS itself instead of against somebody else's cloud. It works with the iPhone, Android, Outlook and Thunderbird without installing anything odd: it is the same protocol (CalDAV and CardDAV) they already speak out of the box.

• The account is the same one as for your files over WebDAV. This product has a rule —one person, one account, one password— and a separate calendar user would break it. To give somebody access, turn WebDAV on in their entry (User and group) and type their password again.
• Each person sees their own and nothing else.
• The calendars live on the volume, so they go into the backups along with the rest of the data without doing anything.

How the phone connects

1. On the phone: Settings → Accounts → Add account → Other → CalDAV account (or CardDAV for contacts).
2. Server: the address the panel shows (http://<your-nas>:5232/).
3. Username and password: their own NAS ones.

From outside the house, come in through the VPN first. Publishing the calendar on the internet as it is means exposing a password-protected service to the whole world.

Network printer

Control Panel → Printer.

A USB printer only prints from the machine it is plugged into, and that machine has to be switched on. Plugged into the NAS, everybody prints —Windows, the Mac and the phone through AirPrint— with no cables and no taking turns.

1. Plug the printer into the NAS over USB.
2. It shows up in the panel under "Plugged into the NAS": give it a name and press "Add".
3. Turn the sharing switch on.

The NAS tries the driverless driver first (IPP "everywhere", the one printers from the last ten years speak) and, if yours does not support it, the generic one. If your model needs its own, the panel tells you: it is added from the NAS's own CUPS page (https://<your-nas>:631).

Cloud sync

Backups → "Sync" tab.

One folder on the NAS and one folder in your cloud (Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox…), identical. It uses the same accounts you already connected in Files.

It is not a backup. A backup keeps versions and deletes nothing on its own. Here both sides end up identical, deletions included: what you delete on one side disappears from the other. To protect your data use backups; this is for having it in both places.

Three directions, and it is worth understanding what each one deletes:

Handbrake. If a pass were about to delete more than fifty files, it stops and warns you. That is the only thing separating "the data disk did not mount" from "it emptied my Drive". If you really did delete a thousand files on purpose, the sync will fail once: launch it again and it will carry on.

The first "both directions" run pairs up the two sides without deleting anything. From then on the changes travel.