New NAS to replace Dlink DNS-323

I've been using the Dlink DNS-323 NAS for quite a while now but I've been finding it too difficult to ensure its backed up correctly.  Tried tinkering with various "fun plugz" for backups to USB (and other cool features) but its never seemed stable or reliable enough.  Tried mounting the CIFS shares from Windows and never seemed to be able to find a good way of consistently backing it up in a reliable way.

The best way I found was mounting the CIFS share on a Linux box and then using incremental rsync to backup to a USB attached drive.  This worked but I don't usually have a Linux box just sitting around just for backup purposes.  Tried getting a Linux VM to automatically start on my Windows Media Center box, pass thru a USB hard drive to the VM, run a cronjob to launch rsync, and so on and so on.....

In the end its just harder than it needs to be and I'm feeling like its only a matter of time before I lose some data.

So it's time to search for a new NAS box.  Some features I'm looking for:

• Scheduled (and ideally incremental) backup to local USB disk
• Ideally the ability to encrypt the contents in case of theft

All I really need is a single bay device.  I don't plan to run RAID; just regular consistent backups is all I think I need at home these days.

I've heard good things about the QNAP devices.  They appear to support backup to local USB disk, however I couldn't see any scheduling or incremental backup features at first look.  Encryption also only looks like a feature on the mid-to-high end devices that have a Intel Atom CPU.

Then came across the Synology devices.  Backup to local USB disk with schedules appears to be supported.  They also talk about "Time Backup" which looks like an incremental type backup.  Encryption also looks like its supported even on the lower end devices.  On top of that, the standard OS (Disk Station Manager) which runs on all their devices looks pretty easy to use with a comprehensive feature set.

So in the end decided to go with:

• Synology DS211j
• 1x Seagate 2TB "Green" HDD (STL2000DL003, 5900RPM, 64MB Cache)

The DS211j is basically the entry level 2-bay device.  Went for this over the current 1-bay device as it has a faster CPU (DS211j @ 1.2Ghz vs DS110j @ 800Mhz, both 128MB RAM).  As won't be using RAID, thought this might give an advantage when encrypting data or doing some other more CPU intensive tasks.  Having 2-bays also give possibility of expansion in future or ease of data migration to a larger drive.  Thought briefly about going to the DS111 or DS211 (1.6Ghz/256GB) for extra CPU/RAM but didn't feel like it would be worth the money for me.

Anyway, will post my impressions soon...