Folks,

I have an Archer A7 v5.0 with firmware 1.2.1 Build 20220714 rel.75573(5553) The A7 is setup in Access Point mode.

I've been playing around with a linux bash script to copy some of my files to the Archer A7 USB drive to be able to access the files from other computers on my network. Think of it as small home file server, though I do have a separate dedicated file/media server on the network. And it has taken me some time to create the script from many sources on the web.

Some of the drawbacks are that the Archer A7 only supports NTFS as the file system for the USB drive. So Rsync balks at it, no ability to SSH into the USB drive and so forth. What I figured out was to use CurlFtpFS with linux as it then creates a path to the Archer A7 USB drive as if it were part of the native linux file system, which it is not, though it works as such.

So the script will copy files and folders to the A7 USB drive as I wanted, though with a few other issues. Wanting to not copy files that already existed unless the file on the source was newer than the one on the A7, created another discovery. When a file is created or modified on the A7 it only saves created/modified time to the minute and does not save the seconds part of the time, it also appears that the seconds/fraction of seconds is truncated rather than rounded. I found this by getting the epoch time of A7 files and they always end on the minute not seconds and fraction of seconds. This is not good when needing to compare file created/modified/access times. The A7 also only saves the file with UTC or Zulu time, even if the A7 is set for the local time where the A7 is set for. No option to set the A7 to use the defined local time for USB file times.

Times seem to be peculiar in the A7, system logs use local time to the second, actual time is shown as local time to the second, so why not in USB file times?

No I'm not worried about file versioning or collaboration as this is just for my personal home use.

Having gone through this, was it worth it? Yes and No.

On the Yes side was the learning experience, both from the scripting side and finding out about the A7's abilities or lack there of.

On the No side was the time spent doing it, and again the lack of abilities of the A7.

Would I do it again or recommend it for others. No. Why? I believe it would be easier to set up a Raspberry Pi to do the same thing with out the limitations of the A7.

TP-Link should look at the implementation of the A7 USB file sharing capabilities and compare them with those of a Raspberry Pi file server.

Take Care & Enjoy!