It has it's quirks, as do most things. Not cheap, the version I've got is 350 quid from Richersounds (if they've got any left). Mind you hook up a pair of speakers to it and you've got a self contained music system or you can plumb it into a separate amp and speakers.
The only thing that would stop me giving a unreserved recommendation is that cocktailAudio broke the back-up procedure in a firmware update last year and seem in no hurry to fix it. You used to be able to do incremental back-ups to either a NAS drive or USB drive plugged into the unit. Now you can only back up the entire content each time. So instead of adding the half dozen or so new albums to an existing back-up it zaps the whole back-up and copies all 1000 albums or whatever you have from scratch! And that can quite literally take days to complete.
Can't you take the drive out and back it up on a computer using hard drive caddies? Or a dual caddy with backup function built in (no computer required)?
Can't you take the drive out and back it up on a computer using hard drive caddies? Or a dual caddy with backup function built in (no computer required)?
Yes very easily as the drive is designed to slide out on a tray. The point is that up until a recent firmware upgrade the back-up routine built into the unit was perfectly fine. Each time you made a back-up it only backed up newly added albums/songs so was relatively quick and painless.
Now however it is severely broken and does a complete full back-up from scratch every time overwriting the previous backup. And that is very slow and long winded if you have several hundred GB of data on the drive as most users do.
If you can temporarily install the original disk and one for backing up onto your computer you could use microsofts synctoy to sync the 2 disks. Should be faster than copying everything.
Or use a 2 disk caddy with backup facility - I use one to backup 2TB drives overnight.
synctoy is actually very versatile - it has different backup/syncing options.
Comments
It has it's quirks, as do most things. Not cheap, the version I've got is 350 quid from Richersounds (if they've got any left). Mind you hook up a pair of speakers to it and you've got a self contained music system or you can plumb it into a separate amp and speakers.
The only thing that would stop me giving a unreserved recommendation is that cocktailAudio broke the back-up procedure in a firmware update last year and seem in no hurry to fix it. You used to be able to do incremental back-ups to either a NAS drive or USB drive plugged into the unit. Now you can only back up the entire content each time. So instead of adding the half dozen or so new albums to an existing back-up it zaps the whole back-up and copies all 1000 albums or whatever you have from scratch! And that can quite literally take days to complete.
Yes very easily as the drive is designed to slide out on a tray. The point is that up until a recent firmware upgrade the back-up routine built into the unit was perfectly fine. Each time you made a back-up it only backed up newly added albums/songs so was relatively quick and painless.
Now however it is severely broken and does a complete full back-up from scratch every time overwriting the previous backup. And that is very slow and long winded if you have several hundred GB of data on the drive as most users do.
Or use a 2 disk caddy with backup facility - I use one to backup 2TB drives overnight.
synctoy is actually very versatile - it has different backup/syncing options.