I forgot to mention, I got my replacement LinkStation a week or so ago and finally got a Linkstation backup procedure in place.
Theres about 500Gb of data on the drive - the backup took 3 days
It would do about 200Gb of data then for some reason fold its arms, sit cross-legged and refuse to continue, which meant I would have to do a firmware reset to remove the backup job. It is an absolute pain in the arse!
Thankfully, since I was using a differential overwrite backup, it picked up from where it left off each time and now I have a satisfactory backup in place. Next, Ill be seeing if I can use sleep mode to automate startup of both units in the wee hours followed by a backup run and auto shutdown.
So for anyone thinking of doing a backup run of a large volume of data, save yourself some hassle and do it in smaller chunks, unless you want to be resetting the firmware once a day for three days. I wouldnt have minded this if not for the fact that on first boot PCCast goes apesh*t trying to create a media library and you have to spend 5 mins waiting for it to login to disable all that.
I might try Stevie Wonder firmware still and see how I get on.
My next step will be to try to work out how to send an email that will work its way to my phone over SMS (for free). Postcast server will aid the email part of this, but I havnt seen a free email > SMS service anyway. O2 offer such a thing to broadband customers that have an O2 phone, but not to their regular phone customers