
There are three big differences between Cloud Station and Dropbox: First, "the cloud" here actually refers to your Synology NAS, not Amazon's data centers (Dropbox uses Amazon S3 for its backing store), so while convenient, your cloud is only as secure as your NAS backup routine.
NETATALK SYNOLOGY INSTALL
Cloud Station functions much in the same fashion as Dropbox: there's a client to install on your desktops and laptops, and then you designate a Cloud Station folder which is replicated between your other computers and your NAS. One package in particular is worth a couple of paragraphs of notice: Synology's Cloud Station, which expands on the basic functionality provided by the built-in ezCloud application. The DiskStation can already back up connected LAN hosts, but the Time Backup package provides you with the ability to actually replicate the unit's contents to another Synology NAS elsewhere. There are several extremely useful server tools, including a fully configurable DHCP server, a syslog server, and an LDAP server for running your own directory service. There's also a Piwik Analytics package for keeping tabs on how your sites are doing, and a PHPMyAdmin package for graphically managing your MySQL databases. If you want to fiddle around with a self-hosted CMS, this is an excellent way to get started. There's more than enough CPU and RAM headroom to run any of these, along with a moderately sized site. These all work with the Synology's built-in PHP and MySQL to provide your choice of content management system. There are precompiled and ready-to-go packages for Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, and MediaWiki. The Media Server package provides for sending multimedia content over DNLA/uPnP, and there's also a Plex Media Server package to turn your NAS into a full-featured HTPC. iTunes server emulates an iTunes installation and speaks Bonjour over your LAN to other iTunes clients Audio Station is more device-agnostic. The iTunes Server package and the Audio Station package both let you take music in your DiskStation's music share and directly access it. Unfortunately, we simply don't have the time to go into all of them, but there are several highlights worth mentioning.

NETATALK SYNOLOGY SOFTWARE
The Package Center contains Synology-sanctioned add-on software for the DiskStation, and there's a huge range of things you can add. Nestled in the Synology DSM's menu is the Package Center, and it's a treasure trove of awesomeness. Right out of the box, the DS-412+ is a powerful NAS with lots of features, but there are worlds of extra functionality that can be unlocked. Add-on software to teach your NAS new tricks The actual backups themselves are all created in separate sparse bundles on the Time Machine share, just like on a Time Capsule, and OS X is smart enough not to get mixed up when accessing a Time Machine share containing multiple sparse bundles.

NETATALK SYNOLOGY MAC
Then, all you have to do is mount the Time Machine share on each Mac using the specific user account you created for that Mac, and each Mac effectively has a limited amount of Time Machine space it can use. The quota is set per-volume, but since we only have one volume, the effect is global. This will cause the NAS to issue "disk full" errors to the account if it ever tries to put more than 500GB of data at any time onto the NAS. Enlarge / Assigning a 500GB quota for this user as I create the account.
