LaCie CloudBox Reviewed

Menu Tour

Once the configuration is complete, you can log into the browser-based dashboard shown in Figure 6. As you can see, the interface is clean and simple with only six submenus.

The Home page shows the status of your backup, how much space you’ve used, when your license expires and summary information for the other five menus. To navigate to the other submenus, you merely click on them. Alternatively, you can drag the large icon into the center of the screen – a feature we’ve seen on other LaCie products.

Figure 6: Dashboard Home

Note: this screen shot was taken after I had configured the CloudBox and it had been online for 4 days.

Here are the highlights of the other five menus.

CloudBox Settings - This menu provides a summary of general settings such as user name, account expiration date, account email address. Under Backup settings, you can set upload and download speed limits and initiate an online backup immediately.

The CloudBox also measures your internet connection speed and provides you with an estimate of how much data you can upload per day.For my cable connection, the estimate is 7.0 GB/day.

For me, the most interesting part of the settings menu is the History tab, shown in Figure 7. It shows the start and end time for each online backup session as well as the total amount of data synchronized.

Figure 7: Settings > History tab

If you click on the Done link, you get a session summary as shown in Figure 8. The summary information is the extent of the data. You don’t get a complete file listing of files backed up.

Figure 8: Backup summary

General Settings - This menu shows the machine name, workgroup, language, time, date and time zone. You also have the option of disabling the status light.

Support - Here you’ll find the current version of firmware running on your CloudBox and the auto-update status. Under the Log window, you’ll see the end time for the most recent backups along with the last firmware update as shown in Figure 9. If you download the System log and unzip it, you’ll find all of the log files you’d normally find on a Linux system in the /etc and /var directories.

Figure 9: Dashboard Support page

Users - In this menu, you can create and edit users. For each user, you can set a quota. As you create a user, a private share is created using the user’s login name. (eg, admin). Note, however, that only the original account name has administrator rights.

Network - This menu lets you manually configure the IP address configuration, and enable the use of a proxy server.