Until now my backup workflow was just syncronizing my desktop with my laptop. That way I’d always keep important stuff replicated. But after accidentally formated the Storage partition (the WRONG one!) and lost some non-important files like my music collection and 24: Season 3 (the one I haven’t seen yet), i decided that was time to get an external storage for my stuff.
Having two computers, I decided for a network external storage, so it can be ways accessed from any computer in the network through the air. I went to FNAC to buy Packard Bell’s NetStore 500 for 129€, but they informed me it was discontinued. The second choice, and the one I bought, was MyBook World Edition 1 – 500GB for 150€.
My purpose for this drive was to work as a time-machine backup and also a NAS for wide-network accessible storage. I though about doing the initial backup through USB, but i found out that the USB port is actually for connecting another external disk1. So all the configuration must be through the router-like http admin area. At least this one works in Safari! But the manual did not mention the default username and password! It was supposed to be set using their windows-only software. After checking World Edition 2 manual, I found out the so-damn-secret combination: admin:123456. First things first: updated firmware.
However the World Edition 1 (the single-drive edition) does not support formatting in the web interface as Edition 2 does. So…. hack-time! Got my screwdriver and dismantled the whole drive (pretty tough!).
It is a SATA driver, so I used my super-cool SATA/IDE{2,5;3,5} to USB driver and connected it to my macbook from which I took this screenshot for the partition table:
However I couldn’t resize the last one to make it HFS+. But then I had a glimpse, and probably the Linux inside MyBook wouldn’t recognize HFS+, so I gave up on the idea of having TimeMachine there. got the disk back inside the box, and now it is working perfectly, so I can set up my Backup Workflow.
Resources
1 Which may be very useful when I move to my almost-finished-for-2-years brand new house, and connect a media storage disk to the TV, and through USB to this one, so I can access the media center from anywhere.