I am currently helping out a Lawyer Friend of mine setup his small office with a LinkStation NAS drive. The NAS drive that he purchased was on that can do RAID 1 hard disk mirroring so that all of his documents would be mirrored across two drives. This works great, but does not give him a backup off of the NAS device in the event that there is a extreme failure.

Luckily the LinkStation drives have the ability to backup information to a external USB drive that is connected to the back of the device. This is great, but the information on how to configure it is almost nonexistent and there is really no good description of what the different options are. I did find the following information associated with the different Backup Options for the drive online which really seemed to help me out.

Overwrite Backup (Complete/Differential):
Saves as “_backups\sourcename\data”. Does a complete backup every time, if a file is on the destination that is not on the source, it will be deleted.

Overwrite Backup (Append):
Saves as “_backups\sourcename\data”. Does a complete backup the first time, subsequent backups only send the changes. If a file is on the destination that is not on the source, it will not be deleted.

Overwrite Backup (Differential):
Saves as “_backups\sourcename\data”. Does a complete backup the first time, subsequent backups only send the changes. If a file is on the destination that is not on the source, it will be deleted.