Time Capsule or other Back Up/Portable Hard Drive

Ann McRae

Well, I have an iMac that is 16 months old or so. It has Tiger rather than Leopard currently. This means it does not have Time Machine.

I want to have an external drive for both storage and security.

Was at the Apple Store today (it was miserable and blizzarding and the Apple store is in THE mall, so it was a good choice of places to be).

Talked about Time Capsule, for a few reasons. I was intrigued by the possibility of it acting as a back up for all of our computers. Is there a downside to this? (We have 3 PCs and 3 macs in the house).

The fact that it could replace our wireless station, and segregate the signal so we don't have bandwidth trouble when I upload and the kid is XBoxing.

I guess I have 3 questions:

Should I put Leopard and therefore Time Machine onto the iMac?

Is there a good reason to buy time Capsule instead of just any brand of portable hard drive?

Does anyone have experience using it as wifi, and does it work as the fellow said re: segregating signal?

ann

catspaw

I decided against time capsule the same reason I dislike the imac and combo tv/dvd players and phone/answering machines. If one part dies, the entire whole is worthless, or worth a lot less. I like to keep my 'parts' separate, so if I want to upgrade one (like get a bigger HD and move time machine to a 1.5 T drive) I can without sacrificing the other. Especially these days when the price of external harddrives has dropped a LOT (I think my first T drive was $200+, my latest was $150 on sale) but time capsule prices have *not*.

I do have Apple's airport extreme and express and REALLY like the network. I had no issue spending the extra $$ for convenience and everything else that came with it. The house network is awesome, both betweeen machines (PCs and Macs, wired and wireless) and for net access (xbox, PCs, minis, ibook, etc).

colourbox

Ann McRae wrote:

Talked about Time Capsule, for a few reasons. I was intrigued by the possibility of it acting as a back up for all of our computers. Is there a downside to this? (We have 3 PCs and 3 macs in the house).

A lot of people on this forum have huge photo libraries. The biggest Time Capsule is just 1TB, which means you may not be able to fit rolling backups of multiple machines on it if any of those machines has a huge media library. Remember, it backs up every hour, so if you are working on a 100MB photo for 3 hours, you'll soon have 3 copies of that photo in the Time Capsule. Time Capsule will consolidate backups over time, for instance the backup from 2 months ago may contain just the last version of that week and not every hour's, but you could still run out of space fast. When it runs out of room, it starts deleting the oldest backups.

I only use Time Capsule to keep two machines' boot drives backed up. Photo, video, and music libraries are on a separate regular backup regime, not using Time Capsule.

I intentionally bought the smaller Time Capsule for a lower up-front cost, to back up systems only and not my media, and when its warranty runs out I'm going to crack it open using directions from the Web, and throw in a much bigger drive. I'll probably be able to afford a bare 1.5TB drive by then. This will be much cheaper than buying the 1TB Time Capsule now.

I do not think it can back up PCs using Time Capsule, but you can share the Time Capsule disk so that PCs can use it as network storage, and then use Windows backup software to back up to that.

It is somewhat risky to have all your backups on that one disk in the Time Capsule. It is a potential point of failure. There is a USB port on the back which you can use to Archive the current backups to another hard disk. It would be a good idea to do that regularly.

Ann McRae wrote:

Is there a good reason to buy time Capsule instead of just any brand of portable hard drive? Does anyone have experience using it as wifi, and does it work as the fellow said re: segregating signal?

I used it to replace my flaky old wireless router, but I have the previous version of Time Capsule that does not segregate the signal. It works very well as a wireless router.

If I did not need the wireless router part, I probably would have used a reliable hard drive of some kind.

You may find the Macworld review of the new Time Capsule to be helpful. The reviewer specializes in wireless.

cmason

Ann:

To me, Time Capsule doesn't offer any specific benefits as a router over any other router. You can get this 'segmented' stuff from nearly any router. However, I think the Time Capsule is worth looking at if you need 1)wireless backup and 2) seamless wireless print.

I use Time Machine now, and really like it. I simply have a hard drive attached over Firewire. Since this is an iMac, this is very convenient. However, for a Macbook, this is a real pain, as you have to plug into the hard drive every hour for Time Machine. Time Capsule solves this by doing this over the network. This can be done with other networked hard drives, but many don't work with Time Machine. So if you have a Macbook: TimeCapsule is good, iMac, not so much.

As for wireless print, I have a printer on a Cisco wireless print server, and for Mac, it is hit or miss, often miss. It oddly doesnt work half the time, and there is no guarantee it will work from Cisco. However, I hear good things about the Airport/Time Capsule print support, so that sounds much better.

If you don't need wireless print, and you use an iMac, I think you will be better off with just an external harddrive.

By the way, I don't use Time Machine for my photos, I back them up with a different plan (I create images of the photo hard drive and store them elsewhere). Doing this, my iMac has a 500GB drive for Time Machine, and it has used less than 100GB so far. (I have 100GB of images alone.)

Ann McRae

catspaw wrote:

I decided against time capsule the same reason I dislike the imac and combo tv/dvd players and phone/answering machines. If one part dies, the entire whole is worthless, or worth a lot less. I like to keep my 'parts' separate, so if I want to upgrade one (like get a bigger HD and move time machine to a 1.5 T drive) I can without sacrificing the other. Especially these days when the price of external harddrives has dropped a LOT (I think my first T drive was $200+, my latest was $150 on sale) but time capsule prices have *not*.

I do have Apple's airport extreme and express and REALLY like the network. I had no issue spending the extra $$ for convenience and everything else that came with it. The house network is awesome, both betweeen machines (PCs and Macs, wired and wireless) and for net access (xbox, PCs, minis, ibook, etc).

Good point about keeping parts separate. We currently have 3 macs and 3 pcs, and a bungalow. Router sits in a room at one end of the house, and kids room is downstairs and diagonally opposite end of house. Wireless does not reach his room, and I need to solve that. Also need to solve the fight for bandwidth if I am uploading and the other kid is xbox-ing. Will check Airport out.

ann

Ann McRae

colourbox wrote:

A lot of people on this forum have huge photo libraries. The biggest Time Capsule is just 1TB, which means you may not be able to fit rolling backups of multiple machines on it if any of those machines has a huge media library. Remember, it backs up every hour, so if you are working on a 100MB photo for 3 hours, you'll soon have 3 copies of that photo in the Time Capsule. Time Capsule will consolidate backups over time, for instance the backup from 2 months ago may contain just the last version of that week and not every hour's, but you could still run out of space fast. When it runs out of room, it starts deleting the oldest backups.

I do not think it can back up PCs using Time Capsule, but you can share the Time Capsule disk so that PCs can use it as network storage, and then use Windows backup software to back up to that.

It is somewhat risky to have all your backups on that one disk in the Time Capsule. It is a potential point of failure. There is a USB port on the back which you can use to Archive the current backups to another hard disk. It would be a good idea to do that regularly.

I used it to replace my flaky old wireless router, but I have the previous version of Time Capsule that does not segregate the signal. It works very well as a wireless router.

If I did not need the wireless router part, I probably would have used a reliable hard drive of some kind.

You may find the Macworld review of the new Time Capsule to be helpful. The reviewer specializes in wireless.

Thanks for the links to the review, will go read. I didn't think about the rolling back ups, and that is something I definitely need to consider.

Thanks much

ann

Andy

related: check out http://backblaze.com

Ann McRae

cmason wrote:

Ann:

To me, Time Capsule doesn't offer any specific benefits as a router over any other router. You can get this 'segmented' stuff from nearly any router. However, I think the Time Capsule is worth looking at if you need 1)wireless backup and 2) seamless wireless print.

I use Time Machine now, and really like it. I simply have a hard drive attached over Firewire. Since this is an iMac, this is very convenient. However, for a Macbook, this is a real pain, as you have to plug into the hard drive every hour for Time Machine. Time Capsule solves this by doing this over the network. This can be done with other networked hard drives, but many don't work with Time Machine. So if you have a Macbook: TimeCapsule is good, iMac, not so much.

As for wireless print, I have a printer on a Cisco wireless print server, and for Mac, it is hit or miss, often miss. It oddly doesnt work half the time, and there is no guarantee it will work from Cisco. However, I hear good things about the Airport/Time Capsule print support, so that sounds much better.

If you don't need wireless print, and you use an iMac, I think you will be better off with just an external harddrive.

By the way, I don't use Time Machine for my photos, I back them up with a different plan (I create images of the photo hard drive and store them elsewhere). Doing this, my iMac has a 500GB drive for Time Machine, and it has used less than 100GB so far. (I have 100GB of images alone.)

Thank you for this. We have 2 macbooks in the house, so that point is well taken.

As well, having wireless printing would be a major plus for us. Right now if the kids do homework on a laptop, we email it to the desk top to print. Our printer really needs replacing because getting it to print is hit or miss too. Although it never misses from my iMac.

Great info, thanks.

ann

Ann McRae

And so I have another question regarding Time Capsule.

I am setting up for some on site event printing sales.

This is what I was thinking:

An iMac Mini

Time Capsule for backup and storage there.

My 23" cinema display for my worker to sort and edit.

Several cheap monitors for viewing.

A wireless internet stick so I can use Google Check Out for CC payment.

SmugMug coupons to rally further sales!

and I am not sure what for prints.

Genius or Idiot?

davev

Andy wrote:

related: check out http://backblaze.com

The problem that I would have with an online backup, besides the security issue, is the fact that Comcast, my internet carrier, only allows 250 gigs of uploads per month.

The 750 gig hard drive that I put into my IMac, (yes it can be done) is way over that mark with what I have on it.

I have a 500 gig hard drive for backing up my photos, plus another external 750 gig to use for leopard's time machine.

The bad news news, they are all in the same house. If something happens here, I could lose them all.
Of course, seeing that I'm not in business selling my shots, I guess that would probably be the least of my problems.

DavidTO

You can get wireless printing from an Airport Express.

I like Time Machine for local backups, it's easy. For desktops it's great, as they're always in proximity. For laptops it can be a PITA, since it spends so much time "Preparing" the disk that sometimes it won't complete a backup while I've got it open and in the house. Then I get error messages and "this computer has not been backed up in..." messages. It works, just not as well. I really don't understand what all the "preparing" stuff is, it takes forever sometimes.

Don't the new Airport Extremes allow you to attach drives and that then make it just like a Time Capsule? I know, it's not as neat and tidy, but may give you more flexibility. I could be wrong on that, but I thought they added that ability in the last update.

Backblaze is great, I have an invite if anyone's having trouble getting into the Beta. There are other options, as well. I'm backing up 189gigs for $5/month. Safe and offsite. I've tried the recovery and it takes a while for them to prep a zip file for download, but it happens.

DavidTO

Ann McRae wrote:

And so I have another question regarding Time Capsule.

I am setting up for some on site event printing sales.

This is what I was thinking:

An iMac Mini

Time Capsule for backup and storage there.

My 23" cinema display for my worker to sort and edit.

Several cheap monitors for viewing.

A wireless internet stick so I can use Google Check Out for CC payment.

SmugMug coupons to rally further sales!

and I am not sure what for prints.

Genius or Idiot?

This would be a poor use of Time Capsule, I believe. I would just have an extra firewire drive for this, and use something like SuperDuper.

Andy

davev wrote:

The problem that I would have with an online backup, besides the security issue, is the fact that Comcast, my internet carrier, only allows 250 gigs of uploads per month.

I'd get a new carrier if you can. That's really lame.

cmason

Ann McRae wrote:

And so I have another question regarding Time Capsule.

I am setting up for some on site event printing sales.

This is what I was thinking:

Ann, agree with others, you dont need a time capsule for events, just a usb harddrive or two. since you only have one machine, no need for networking.

Not sure why the mac mini+23" display makes sense, unless you already have them, since a 20 or even 24" iMac would be cheaper (and more powerful) than that combo.

Not sure how you hook up 'a couple' of monitors to the mac mini or even an iMac. 2 is easy, more, I suspect take some additional adapters or something. of course, if you have more than one mac, then it is really simple.


Edit: update, just stumbled across this: iPhone app for processing credit card transactions: http://www.tuaw.com/2009/03/13/first-look-transactions-for-iphone/

catspaw

DavidTO wrote:

Don't the new Airport Extremes allow you to attach drives and that then make it just like a Time Capsule? I know, it's not as neat and tidy, but may give you more flexibility. I could be wrong on that, but I thought they added that ability in the last update.

Yup, they do! hence why I like keeping parts separate and putting together what I need.

colourbox

cmason wrote:

Ann, agree with others, you dont need a time capsule for events, just a usb harddrive or two. since you only have one machine, no need for networking.

Right, if you use a Time Capsule then you must set up a network at each event, which seems like adding complexity to your day (unless you need to network your on-site equipment for other reasons too). It would be easier just to plug a hard drive into the Mac you're backing up.

For those who don't know, there is no way to connect a computer to a Time Capsule as a local drive. Ethernet or wireless is the only way to get at it. It is purely a network device. (This also means you can't run disk utilities on it unless you remove the Time Capsule's hard drive and stick it in an enclosure or a drive dock/cable). The USB port on the back of the Time Capsule is only for attaching drives for the Time Capsule to share or use as another backup target; you can't use it to connect to a computer.

cmason wrote:

Not sure how you hook up 'a couple' of monitors to the mac mini or even an iMac. 2 is easy, more, I suspect take some additional adapters or something.

Actually the latest Mac mini has 2 video ports, unlike all the ones that came before.