Backup and Services
We will now quickly walk through some backup and restore functions as well as other services.
You get your local backups. You'll have a plethora of backup options available to save all content, or just firmware preferences. RSYNC is already factory installed. Very popular under system admins btw. But you can also plan backups over FTP, through some popular cloud services and sure, externally to, say, a USB stick or drive.
Once you hit the services tab, that's where the serious stuff is enabled/disabled and configured. Above, the Rsync server, easy enough to deal with and set up really. The advantage of RSYNC is that it'll make backups to a client at full LAN/WAN performance in a 1:1 copy fashion including Unix/Linux permissions like ownership and RW level.
But also the Apache web-server is available to you, you can even SSL protect it if you get some certifications. Lacking however is support for the setup of multiple domains tied to this device, virtual hosts does not seem to be enabled, neither did I see some sort of PHP caching. Memcached was available in the apps already, but I like to see some sort of APC/XCache software feature so that all PHP files will get nicely cached into memory. Good old MySQL is available as well. You'll need it enabled for the majority of apps in the app center, just leave MySQL (MariaDB) remote access disabled (binds to localhost).
The NAS supports being a fully fledged VPN server as well, that way you can tunnel and encode all traffic. You can also use it as a client - as you can see, if you'd like to use the NAS connected to an external VPN server and have it function as hidden encrypted client, there's that option as well but remember, your outbound public services cannot be used then as they get tied to a public VPN IP. Stuff like this will become more and more important in the years to come.