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[kwlyon]

Is there a way to to make a folder on the DNS 323 look like a disk drive to my laptop while accessing via the internet?  What I'd like to do is use my laptop to access files on the NAS both at home and away from home  without transferring files.   In particular, want to put my outlook files on the server and access them at home and away without having to transfer files every time I leave home.

Forgive me if this is a really dumb question. I have not yet purchased my NAS 323, so don't have access to the documentation, so I don't know if this is easy, impossible, or something in between. 

Ken

[dosborne]

The short answer is no, the long answer is yes

The manual can be downloaded in PDF from DLink support. I know I read it thoroughly before purchasing as I do with most products.

The standard windows drive mapping cannot be used but you can setup a tunnel into your home system, map a drive via a ftp client or use 3rd party software to accomplish what you want, it just may take a bit of work, particularly figuring out which ports to open in your router.

Have you considered using a sync program to keep the primary files on the laptop and just sync/backup to the NAS instead?

[jamieburchell]

As outlook data files can be huge, I would also think that accessing them on your NAS over the Internet would be exteremly slow.

Not sure of your exact mail setup or what you are trying to store where but you might consider using Google apps which now has outlook mail and calendar support. You can access your mail from anywhere, and they look after the data. It will download 1Gb of mail to your outlook client as a local cache for speed. Our company moved over to it and got rid of our exchange server months ago. It's also fast.

[kwlyon]

Thanks, dosborne, for the pointers.  I've looked up mapping drives via ftp and can see that it's feasible to remotely access files on the server as though I were there. That would probably work well for most files, but is probably not something I'd want to do for my outlook file.  Seems like there'd be a good chance of corrupting it, even if it worked, performancewise.

I can imagine using something like logmein to run outlook on my home pc.  That could work. I'd just have to leave the home pc on all the time, which is one thing I was trying to avoid with a nas.

Syncing is actually what I'm doing now. Before each trip I sync all the files I might use (most of them) from my pc to my laptop, and when I return, I sync them back. Looks like with a nas I might have to sync only my outlook files....

Ken

....

The standard windows drive mapping cannot be used but you can setup a tunnel into your home system, map a drive via a ftp client or use 3rd party software to accomplish what you want, it just may take a bit of work, particularly figuring out which ports to open in your router.

Have you considered using a sync program to keep the primary files on the laptop and just sync/backup to the NAS instead?

[kwlyon]

Thanks, jamieburchell, for your quick reply.   

My outlook files are indeed huge and I'm giving up on the idea of accessing them via the internet.

The real solution, as you point out, is to move my email and other outlook functions into the cloud, using something like google apps. Unfortunately (for me), I use outlook for mail, calendar, notes and tasks, and I sync the calendar, notes & tasks to my smartphone.  I haven't found a way to duplicate this functionality in the cloud. Seems like google is missing a chance to really stick it to MS by not doing this; they're mostly there, but not quite...

Bottom line of this little discussion is that I can use a DNS 323 to access virtually all my files when I'm away, but I'm still looking for a way to handle outlook well.  Next step: see if I can carry my outlook files around on a flashdrive, and plug into whichever of my pc's I'm using at the moment.

Thanks to both of you for helping me thing this through a bit more...

Ken

As outlook data files can be huge, I would also think that accessing them on your NAS over the Internet would be exteremly slow.

Not sure of your exact mail setup or what you are trying to store where but you might consider using Google apps which now has outlook mail and calendar support. You can access your mail from anywhere, and they look after the data. It will download 1Gb of mail to your outlook client as a local cache for speed. Our company moved over to it and got rid of our exchange server months ago. It's also fast.

[jamieburchell]

Take a look at Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/outlook_sync.html

[kwlyon]

Frustratingly close, but no cigar. They sync everything but tasks.  Why do everything but the one thing? It can't be that hard...

[jamieburchell]

Looks that way

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156588