Backup features are extensive and for most of these Iomega has its head firmly in the cloud. Iomega advised us earlier this year that it would be integrating EMC's MozyPro hosted backup service into its business NAS appliances and it's come good on this promise. You can create a new MozyPro account directly from the appliance's web interface which is a separate purchase.
Once activated, you can create scheduled backup jobs of selected folders to the MozyPro servers and browse existing backups to restore data back to the appliance. When our sister title PC Pro took a look at the MozyPro 2 service, they were impressed with the levels of features, but had serious concerns about the support provided by EMC.
The appliance supports Amazon's S3 hosted service and you can configure shares as Facebook or Flickr Active Folders. Then there's Iomega's Personal Cloud which is designed to provide secure data backup and file sharing to remote users as though they were on the same LAN.
We found setup easy enough although you will need to get down and dirty with your router as Personal Cloud requires the addition of a port forwarding rule to allow access from the Internet. The web console provides the port number and internal IP address you need to use for the rule.
Once we had added a port forwarding rule, the Personal Cloud could be accessed remotely by users we had sent invitations to.
We had no problems setting up a rule and could then send email invitations to users to join our private cloud. The email contains a username and unique access code plus a link to download a personalised version of the Storage Manager.
