I can say at this point I'm disappointed in my Tonido Plug2. The concept is great. I like the hardware, but there are some things I need help with and I'm disappointed in the lack of instructions I guess.

Let me first say the main reason I wanted this was a low power always-on server I could MOSTLY use to store my family pics for my family in Japan to see and access of their grandson. Photos are the biggest thing. I want to put thousands of pics, like let's say 4000 photos on here and add as needed. I love how tonido can make a webpage automatically like dropbox can.

Let me go over the issues in total though.

1. I see an option for Root. But there's no way to do that I can see. What's it for? Instructions?
2. Fitness App won't load, I've removed and reinstalled. It hangs.
3. Image caching takes forever and then just doesn't work. Does it really take the server 20 seconds to convert a photo version to 800x600 and generate a thumbnail?
4. Image caching stops working
5. My plug is not accessing now, I have no idea what's up. "An internal server error occurred. Please try again later."
6. Can I just create batch the 800px and thumnail of the photo myself then to save time? I want a gallery up and running instantly.
7. Is there a best practices for photo galleries. File size, amount in folder?
6. What can I do to speed up the photo process.
8. If photos are like this, is there even hope for video?
9. My Plug doesn't have Money app on it, but my latest desktop download does. ??
10. Firefox I'm getting a "this script is busy or not working...do you wish to terminate" when trying to show the tonido dashboard.
11. Photo access is super slow on some and decent on others. It's lke it's on a random cached
12. Is the photo cache going on my USB drive? If not, why not?
13. I have webshare pro, but the webshare webpage doesn't have that pro logo. Is it correct?
14. Maybe tonido needs to provide some use case scenarios if there are limitations on this product it can show how somebody uses it and maybe insert the areas where it's not so strong.
15. Can I get a drive monitor on the plug to check my USB drive and inform me if problems are detected?
16. This probably should be my #2. Is the USB drive running all the time? How does the idle process work? Or is it just spinning?

So I spent $200 on this server expecting it to do the photo thing well and now I'm thinking I should have got the lower end dual or single drive Synology NAS. I'd be using more power maybe but it seems to get rave reviews. If the tonido can't do photos well, how the heck will it do backups correctly?

Believe me I want this to work. The reason I bought a server instead of making one is so I dn't have to scour the web for solutions and to load and automate these server processes myself, such as photo conversion.

A TonidoPlug or NAS is going to be slow in creating thumbnails, please don't expect desktop like performance.

From your notes, the image creation is the important thing you have listed.
As a simplest way to get faster image creation, here's a tip. If you map that folder containing photos into a desktop machine running Tonido and then cache the photos using Tonido on Desktop, it will happen much quicker and the cache created by the Tonido Desktop software will be usable by the plug as well.

Fitness app is a thirdparty app that CodeLathe doesn't have any control on. We are looking at why it is not working.

Money app was pulled recently, but might become available on the plug.

We are working to add a new "Prepare Media" function that will help create thumbs of photos in advance.

I saw the new upcoming feature to prepare thumbnails which is great. This absolutely the kind of thinking that makes you guys good. I did take your advice about preparing the thumbnails on the desktop and copying over the directory to the plug. That worked acceptably too.

I still have other issues to work out. Hopefully looking at the forum others have had resolutions.

1. Internal drive spinning all the time? Is this thing just going to do that? Maybe I should have gotten an SSD then, it's just the expense and much less storage. I don't even know the longevity of SSDs.

2. What's up with the power button? How do I reboot this thing? I held for 10 seconds on both directions and nothing.

3. Do I have the root access? I didn't see a way to get the password when I set it up and it says I could have gotten it or maybe I still can?

4. Is there any option for drive monitoring, S.M.A.R.T. for checking disk health since it IS spinning all the time, maybe it could send me an email?

5. I tried to send my tonido an email attachment, is that all working?

I hope the money app can be resurrected or you know maintained or whatever. I haven't had a chance to discover it yet but I think it's valuable and certainly unique.

Plug has flash. So no spinning. I am assuming you are talking about connected USB drive. You can try enabling power save mode using a linux command hdparm. But the problem is if the harddisk goes into standby mode, the plug computer won't be able to wake it up.
The button you are talking about is not power button. It is button reserved for future use such as switching on/off wireless. Currently it has no functions.
Yes you have root access via SSH. Default password is 'nosoup4u'. If you had set a new password when you setup the plug or via plugadmin via then use that as your root password.
No we don't have that.

Ok, so the disk may be able to go into power save mode but might also go into a sleep mode for which it can't wake up. You know I think it's something Tonido should probably tell us! If the disk doesn't stop spinning, what kind of life would I expect with this server and now the power consumption is much more than 1 watt.

So there's got to be a way around this. I can't believe Debian Squeeze is incapable of powering down and not waking up the disk. I just can't believe that. Makes no sense.

The lack of power-save for the USB disc drives was a disappointment when I got my original TonidoPlug. It was discussed a lot in these forums. I read that modern drives were made to spin down and would have a much reduced life if kept spinning. You could get a drive that had its own power-save features; but most drives would take too long to spin up and then Linux/Tonido would act like the drive was unplugged.

My solution was to get a 64GB USB flash drive. It worked me because I was only storing photos, music, and some docs. But it will not work for anyone wanting to store video.

I'm heartened to hear the success of using disk power-save features on the TonidoPlug2, discussed in these forums. The newer Linux OS must be better dealing with the sleeping drives. Only problem is you need some familiarity with Linux to take advantage of the features. Also, I'm sure some disks will work and some will not.