I installed the first day it was released for my DS415+. Installation went fine without issues.
The perhaps biggest new thing about DSM 6.0b is the new filesystem (btrfs) that's supported. This has a few nice features like filecompression (something I've hardly seen since custom filesystems on AmigaOS :)) and snapshots. Snapshots could work like a backup but does so in an instant. Really interesting stuff.
Anyway, existing volumes on your NAS cannot be converted to btrfs but needs to be reinstalled.
I've also checked out the new "Backup & Restore" application. It works pretty good and comes with built-in versioning. The backups are also incremental which are pretty clever. The drawback is, that if you backups your stuff to an USB-drive and want to bring it to your friends computer someday, you can't. The files are stored in a custom way and are only available through DSM. I bet this is the result of versioning, but I still would have wanted to do a simple backup of my files aswell.
"CloudSync" has improved and now *finally* you can pick any folder you like for cloudsyncing. Works fantastic!
"Videostation" has gone through alot of visual improvements. Still waiting for the "offline transcoding" that will be there for beta2 if I am not mistaken.
Some drawbacks then?
* Well, I still don't like the visuals. Still prefer the old DSM4.3 look. This new flatstyle interface, well, I don't like this new style (that everyone seems to have these days)
* Videostation still doesn't playback DTS-media. Resume is still not entirely reliable if you watch your stuff on different devices.
* I'd like to see "Backup & Restore" with Cloudsupport (Dropbox, GoogleDrive etc.). CloudSync in theory does that but I want to backup my files at regular intervals instead of syncing them.
Compression-enabled file systems have been around all the time, you just didn't notice. ;) You had Stacker with Novell DOS 7.0, DriveSpace with Win 95, NTFS and HFS+ support transparent compression since Win XP and Snow Leopard, respectively.
ReplyDeleteUse a snapshot to get a consistent state of the file system to run a backup of -- all files will exactly fit and match each other no matter how long the backup takes to complete. Do not fail to make actual backups to a device outside your box just because you have snapshots now -- if the file system itself takes damage, so do its snapshots, to the point of irrecoverability.