Apple’s latest bit of hardware, The Time Capsule, sounds like an interesting concept.
It’s a combination of wireless backup unit for Mac clients and also acts as a wireless base station.
Two versions are available:
- 500 Gb
- 1 Terrabyte
It would be complete overkill for someone like me, as any important data is kept on the office network which in turn is backed up to one of our SAN units in Dublin.
It might prove attractive for some people, though I’ll probably discover that there are cheaper alternatives out there without the Apple logo 🙂
Pretty cool item indeed. Might be on my gadget wish list! 😀
For a lot of people, the only reason to get a Time Capsule is that it will support wireless backups with Time Machine. For the non-technical types, that alone would be worth the price of entry.
There are cheaper NAS drives available, but there is no guarantee that Time Machine will work with them. I have a Freecom 500GB drive, and Time Machine will recognise it, and I can start the backup process, but it always fails.
I’ve been meaning to look into rsync and use that for my backups instead.
Dave – it’s not overly priced either. It’s not as cheap as some kit, but if it does what it says it could save headaches 🙂
Paulmc – If it’s as easy to use as they’re suggesting then it could be a winner
It will be interesting to see if “it just works” as Apple promise. Judging by the number of posts on the Apple Forums, there are very few users who have managed to get Time Machine to work over a WLAN. If Time Capsule does work, then it will probably sell like the proverbial hotcakes. If it doesn’t, it could prove to be a major headache for Apple.
On a related note, I see from the Apple Store that they are shipping Time Capsule in 3 – 4 weeks. Just last week, they were promising delivery in February. So it looks like they will miss their original planned shipping date. Maybe they are experiencing issues?
It will be interesting to see if “it just works” as Apple promise. Judging by the number of posts on the Apple Forums, there are very few users who have managed to get Time Machine to work over a WLAN. If Time Capsule does work, then it will probably sell like the proverbial hotcakes. If it doesn’t, it could prove to be a major headache for Apple.
On a related note, I see from the Apple Store that they are shipping Time Capsule in 3 – 4 weeks. Just last week, they were promising delivery in February. So it looks like they will miss their original planned shipping date. Maybe they are experiencing issues?
I usually don’t check the US Store, so I wasn’t aware that they were shipping in the US this month.
If you have a look at the following forum, you’ll see that there are a lot of issues being reported with non-Apple NAS drives and Time Machine.
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=1227
Paul
According to Apple Store US the shipping date is February, so the later date must refer to Ireland etc.,
Which Apple forums are you reading this stuff on?
Michele
I’ve found http://www.macosxhints.com/ to be very handy, especially if you like to play around with hidden settings, and learn a bit more about Mac OS.
Thanks for the link – I’ll check it out.
Are there any other “decent” Mac user forums that I should check out?