Apple Time Capsule Reliability

[Frank Petronio]

So to back-up three roving Mac laptops around the house... just get a 2tb Apple Time Capsule wireless box and the wife and kids are all set, no more of my nagging to back-up anymore... right?

Any concerns? No I am not switching to get Dells ;-) And I use a couple of other drives to do manual back-ups for MY stuff.

[Kirk Gittings]

I've been curious about real world reliability of of Time Capsule too as I've never had to use it too rebuild a crashed drive. I also do a Mozy backup in case, but haven't seen real tests of the success of either of these inn terms of rebuilding your drive.

[David Aimone]

I've not used a time capsule per se, but I have used a network drive attached to a Airport Extreme with multiple computers running Time Machine and backing up over the wireless network.

It works fine, is a no brainer and I've had to restore twice to computers and migrate twice to new computers. No problem so far.

I don't know how similar Time Capsule is in the way it works.

[memorris]

I have a friend who is an Apple service tech and he told me to never consider the Time Capsule. He says they are not reliable and he has had a very large number of them in for repair.

[Frank Petronio]

Yeah the reason I asked is because the reviews on the Apple site are mixed, more so than most of their products.

I already have an Airport Extreme, but the USB port is used by the printer. If I found an Ethernet-equipped external drive then all I have to do is plug it in and let'er rip?

Wouldn't Ethernet be really slow? Or maybe not, the Wi-Fi would be the bottleneck?

And what's a good, reasonable 2TB external HD w Ethernet? Most of the WD and LaCie consumer-style drives are USB/SATA/FW only.

[Frank Petronio]

Actually I think... from my reading... I can just use a simple USB hub to connect both HD and printer to my Airport Extreme and let Time Machine take care of back-up for all the computers... sure seems easy.

Correct? Thanks

[Bob Salomon - HP Marketing]

Been using it for a couple of years. Took a bit of time and lots of calls to Apple before I could find someone who could diagnose why I couldn't connect to Time Machine. Once he found the problem it has worked flawlessly. Only problem is when it tells me the disk is full/ But then it just replaces the oldest. Currently I am backed up on the disk since March of 2009.

Since I travel so much for work, currently 104 night in Marriots alone this year, I also back up to a portable hard drive. Both have proved useful when I accidently erased a file.

Other then that, no need to restore from either.

Go for it, once you are connected it is worry free. But that first back-up of your disk is a long one. Use Eathernet for that one, the wired connection is much, much faster. After that, just go wireless.

[Scott Knowles]

I've had a 1 TB one for two years of continuous operation using the Ethernet connection, except for occassional times when power is off or it's turned off for hardware work. I haven't had to use it for more than occasional restoration of files or applications, but then it's been very handy. I haven't found a way to do a complete erase and restart of the whole system and the incremental changes, which I think would be handy.

[cdholden]

Wouldn't Ethernet be really slow? Or maybe not, the Wi-Fi would be the bottleneck?

An ethernet connection is not only faster, but more reliable too... at least if you have cables/interfaces with some level of integrity.
Dodgy network cards, hubs and cables should be avoided if at all possible. If using older gear, always choose a switch over a hub if given the option. Hubs allow too many network collisions and slow down the network traffic.

[engl]

Id recommend anyone with a significant number of photos or other important data to get an online backup. Having a home backup, such as a Time Capsule, covers HDD failure, but there are many things it does not cover. A house fire, flooding, burglary or electrical spike (from lightning strike, for example) could all wipe your main computer as well as your home backup.

Home backup systems also suffer from poor data integrity checks. When you try to read 5 year old pictures while recovering from a crash, you may find out that there is data corruption on your backup drive. Online services have two or more copies of the data as well as integrity verification.

Ideally use both home and online backup Storage is more limited with online services unless you want to pay big money, so you might have to be more selective. Im doing fine with 150GB, but I dont backup many variations of the same image, and use lossless (LZH/ZIP) compression of TIF files.