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]

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.

[Ken Lee]

I got rid of Time Machine and now use SuperDuper! (http://www.shirt-pocket.com/).

I schedule a regular backup overnight, and it works flawlessly.

It will wake up the computer from deep sleep, do its thing, and put the computer back to sleep. Unlike TimeMachine, it will back up your email and other personal files - whatever you want, whenever you want. I can't recommend it more highly.

The feller who writes it, is a relative of our own John Nanian - another good reason to consider it. ;)

[Kirk Gittings]

I got rid of Time Machine and now use SuperDuper! (http://www.shirt-pocket.com/).

I schedule a regular backup overnight, and it works flawlessly.

It will wake up the computer from deep sleep, do its thing, and put the computer back to sleep. Unlike TimeMachine, it will back up your email and other personal files - whatever you want, whenever you want. I can't recommend it more highly.

The feller who writes it, is a relative of our own John Nanian - another good reason to consider it. ;)

Sounds promising, BUT have you ever had to utilize the copy when your hard drive failed? That's where the rubber meets the road. I currently use Mozy and Time Machine, but have no reason to trust either one. The question I am trying to get at is which software REALLY works when you need to utilize the backup.

[Allen in Montreal]

Hi Ken,

I use super Duper to make mirrored copies of 1 Terra Lacie drives.
Recently, it ejected one disk and copied everything to my hard drive, filled my a machine, but worse, the drive it ejected during the copy seems to be DOA.
Have you every had it spit out a drive mid backup?
How did you deal with it if you have?

Thank you.


Frank,

I use time Machine to a separate firewire drive, flawlessly.
I have never tried the wireless or ethernet, I just pop in the portable 1T drive and it sees the drive and makes a back up. But I have to choose when by plugging the drive in, it does the rest.




I got rid of Time Machine and now use SuperDuper! (http://www.shirt-pocket.com/).

I schedule a regular backup overnight, and it works flawlessly.

It will wake up the computer from deep sleep, do its thing, and put the computer back to sleep. Unlike TimeMachine, it will back up your email and other personal files - whatever you want, whenever you want. I can't recommend it more highly.

The feller who writes it, is a relative of our own John Nanian - another good reason to consider it. ;)

[jnantz]

Sounds promising, BUT have you ever had to utilize the copy when your hard drive failed? That's where the rubber meets the road. I currently use Mozy and Time Machine, but have no reason to trust either one. The question I am trying to get at is which software REALLY works when you need to utilize the backup.

a few months ago, i had to remove and replace 4 drives out of the mac tower my wife is using.
there were 2 dead drives in there, and then the remaining 2 live-drives failed ... at the same time ... i installed new drives used superduper to restore ...and it worked perfectly.

i wish it worked with a network drive ..
we have a myworldbook tb drive with thousands of images on it, and unfortunately have
to manually back things up onto it, and then back it up, it is a real PITA.

john

[Frank Petronio]

I've done a little research and experimenting with the Airport Extreme we have, connecting an external hard drive to it via USB. While it mounts and is a perfectly good network hard drive, deep within Apple's support documentation I found that Time Machine will specifically not work with hard drives connected via the Airport Extreme.

While I don't know all the issues, it seems as though it should work except that Apple has crippled this capability out of the Airport Extreme so as to drive people towards buying the more expensive Time Capsule combination hard drives and WiFi routers.

OK, I can swing a Time Capsule except the more I read up on them the more skitterish I become. Not only is recovery not 100% guaranteed, but if the drive goes it's a $500 paperweight, versus $250 or so for the same size external hard drive.

I could probably also cobble something together with a Linksys router and external hard drives. Or get a NAS drive that uses Ethernet.

But in the end, I think I'm just going to get an inexpensive USB-powered portable HD for the kids to pass around and back up manually. It will teach them a lesson if they loose a little work and they aren't doing anything all that precious anyway.

And I will continue to maintain manual back-ups to multiple FireWire HDs located on and off site, the old-fashioned way.

I'm not a fan of online storage for the big stuff. I was with Photo Shelter for a year, a very enthusiastic participant until their business model for stock photography failed and they shut it down with only two weeks warning. I fear that these sorts of operations will do the same sort of thing when they run into hard times, and given the time it would take to move a TB over the internet, recovery or migration would not be a pretty thing (people would FedEx drives to the company directly sometimes, saved a lot of time).

It does make sense to throw your core portfolio up onto your webhost server though. I am doing that, with password protection, for about 250 images and a few key documents. But that's just normal FTP to my host.

Thanks. Saved me a few hundred bucks. Have a drink on me tonight. Virtually of course.

[Struan Gray]

Frank, we have a generic drive attached to an Airport Extreme for Time Machine backups and it works well. I do test restores and file comparisons from time to time and have not turned up any gotchas in the eighteen months the system has been up and running.

The 'unreliability' seems to boil down to two things. 1) there is network and driver latency, so data may be lost if there's a power cut or other glitch between a computer sending the data and it being written to disk. 2) Time machine doesn't seem to do a full read-back-and-verify cycle for the files it has backed up. Using a USB-attached hard disk will get round the first problem, but not the second.

There is a lot of arcane lore on the web from when the airport extreme first came out, involving Unix commands and sparsebundle creation to get an external disk to work. My technique is to do the initial TM backup with the disk attached to the laptop directly (it's much faster anyway), then to connect it to the Airport Extreme for incremental backups over the network. You just have to tell TM on the laptop where the disk has gone to and it will happily use it.

Time machine is great for regular backups throughout the working day. It's so convenient and easy that it actually happens, and in backup that is 90% of the battle. The only thing I hate about it is that it won't maintain more than one database, so you can't have, say, two disks in rotating use with one kept offsite. I solve that problem, and my paranoia about data safety, by periodically saving whole-disk snapshots onto removable disks which are stashed elsewhere.

[Frank Petronio]

Thanks. For my test Time Machine gave me a warning that it could not use the Airport Extreme Networked Disc so that is not consistent with what you're saying, I shall give it another try. And it was the same drive I've used for Time Machine with a direct FireWire connection.

Perhaps there is some different way of mounting a networked disc? I'll have to look into that.

How do you make a whole-disc snapshot?

[Struan Gray]

There may be machine and system dependencies. In my case I was all ready to put on my nerdy hat and start typing commands into Terminal, but things just worked, so I didn't :-)

I did have to manually mount the networked disk on the desktop the first time, but after that Time Machine mounts it as needed. I also have the TM backup(s) on a separate partition, and use the other partition for music etc.

For snapshot copies I use SuperDuper. Others swear by Carbon Copy Cloner. Both seem to work well. On machines still running 10.4 I use RsyncX, which leverages the built in Unix backup, rsync, but you're getting into hackerland there, especially if you want to do it over a network.