SmallNetBuilder

Features

The My Book Live's original feature set was trimmed down a bit to better suit its target consumer buyer. You won't find printer sharing, Windows Domain / AD support, USB drive copy or jumbo frame controls. You do get the following, however:

• SMB/CIFS network filesystems
• AFP ( for Apple Time Machine)
• NFS (only to default Public mount)
• FTP server
• Snapshot ("safepoint") backup
• SmartWare for Windows bundled client backup application, unlimited licenses
• User level permissions (no groups, no quotas)
• HTTP web administration (no HTTPS)
• iTunes and UPnP AV / DLNA server
• Email alerts (w/ built-in SMTP service for no-hassle setup)
• Remote access to shares via WD2go cloud service
• WD Photos iOS photo viewer app (requires WD 2go service)

The Duo has the same AJAX-based sliding panel interface seen last year in the single-drive Live (Figure 4). But there are a few changes for the Duo.

Figure 4: WD My Book Live Duo admin home page

First up is that PacketVideo's TwonkyMedia server has been replaced by a DLNA Media Server (Figure 5). I can't tell from the process list what exactly has taken TwonkyMedia's place. Perhaps someone with better skills can take a look and let me know. The iTunes server is still there, with the only controls being an Enable and Rescan button.

Figure 5: New media server

Of course, with two drives comes a new Storage menu (Figure 6). I plugged in a WD My Book 3.0 to the USB 2.0 port to see what would be displayed.

Figure 6: Storage menu

WD has finally replaced its clunky pay-for-most-features MioNet remote access feature with a new WD2go cloud service. I cover that separately in this SmallCloudBuilder review. If you're in a hurry, I'll just say that WD2go is a huge improvement over MioNet!

The other big addition for the Duo is its new "safepoint" backup feature. Safepoints are whole-drive snapshot backups that can be taken on-demand or scheduled. Once taken, safepoints can then be incrementally updated manually or automatically daily, weekly or monthly. Figure 7 shows that safepoint targets can be any network share. You can also store safepoints on an attached USB drive.

Figure 7: Duo Safepoint Backup

I uploaded a few hundred MB of data to the Duo's Public folder, then ran a safepoint backup to a share on my QNAP NAS. After the backup completed in a minute or so, I browsed to the safepoint folder (Figure 8) and was pleased to see that files were stored in their original format.

Figure 8: Safepiont backukp files

I've put more screenshots of the Live Duo's interface in the gallery, so feel free to browse through.