Lacie Cloudbox

The Lacie Cloudbox ($199.99 MSRP) is a network-attached hard drive that backs up your data seamlessly to the cloud. Sounds great, right? In principle, automatic backup of a user's most precious data without any intervention on that user's part sounds like a wonderful capability. The reality is that the Cloudbox is simply too expensive for the functionality it offers?especially given the software glitches and the problems I had getting it to communicate with Lacie's Cloud service.

Hardware
The Lacie Cloudbox is a tiny NAS?not much bigger than your typical Direct Attached Storage (DAS) drive. There's one Gigabit Ethernet port for connecting to a router and the power button?no USB ports or other expansion options. Storage capacity is 100GB which seems fairly limited considering how cheap storage in the terabyte range has become. The device is quiet and runs much cooler than other Lacie NASes I've tested, such as the Network Space 2.

Setup
Since Lacie touts the Cloudbox as "hassle-free," I had a tester with little networking or NAS experience set up the device, in addition to doing my own usual testing. We worked via a Windows 7 laptop connected wirelessly to the same network that the Cloudbox was connected to via an Ethernet cable. The unit ships with a Quick Install Guide which instructs users to run the Lacie Network Assistant, which initiates a configuration wizard.

The wizard is very straight-forward, my tester had no issues with the process at this point: set the interface's language (it can translate into several different languages) and the time zone, and that takes care of the first steps.Next, you are prompted to enter a contract number which is affixed to the product's documentation which is used to register your cloud account. Setting up the cloud account is where our testing started to run into problems?what should have been a very simple process turned painful. You create your account, and Lacie's cloud service verifies and registers it. The problem was that the Cloudbox seemed to take forever to register my tester's account, it was a good 30 minutes of just seeing the on-screen message "Registering your account" and nothing more (and that on a fairly speedy Internet connection). Fifteen minutes into the process, my tester received an email verification stating that the account had been successfully registered. Yet that registration was not reflected onscreen. My guinea pig was stymied. Kill the session? Wait? This is exactly the sort of puzzle that should never come up with any device, let alone a "hassle-free" one aimed at mainstream consumers.

This is where I had to intervene on behalf of my befuddled tester. I killed the session and started the wizard again. Instead of picking up where the setup left off, this time the?interface opened up to reveal the message "Retrieving backup information" which was odd because, as far as I knew, there was no data on the Cloudbox to be backed up at this point.? This message remained on screen for another 20 minutes without changing at all. At this point, I switched from a wireless to a wired connection, then disabled the laptop's firewall, and then, in a last act of desperation, switched from Internet Explorer to Chrome. After that, I was able to get past the "Retrieving backup" message and finally finished initial setup. Overall I would rate Cloudbox setup an absolute headache.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/k0nSOL-OdS0/0,2817,2400978,00.asp

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