I was reading the reviews for a NAS backup solution: Western Digital 4TB My Cloud Home Personal Cloud Storage - WDBVXC0040HWT-NESN. I am referring to the this review on the product that criticized the solution on the basis that it wouldn't work without being connected to the Internet. The idea was that it should be possible to disable connectivity to prevent the backup device from being hacked remotely (and, presumably, added to a botnet).
I'm not very familiar with network hardware so this didn't make much sense to me. For the backup to work from a laptop to the NAS device, some sort of connectivity would obviously be needed. The device is presumably plugged into the router using an Ethernet cable, and the data flow presumably goes either laptop->router->NAS or laptop->router->some_server->router->NAS. Is the idea that the former should be possible but that the device is in fact doing the latter?
I realize that it might be hard to judge this device from afar without using it yourself, but your best guess as to what's going wrong with this device would be helpful.