So, my time capsule died this morning. No light, no nothing. Dead. Of course, that takes out the rest of the network, too.
I took it into Apple today, and they swapped it out for a new 1tb model (I had 500gb before). Cheers Apple, I was only expecting a refurb model. It wasn’t under warranty, but the all our Mac’s are, and they are covered under those AppleCare agreements.
The problem I have now is: I don’t trust the device. It’s died after 18 months, like the 100s of others which went the same way. There is no change in the design, so I’d expect it to happen again in another 18 months. I’m even going to put a calendar appointment in to make damn sure it’s totally backed up.
However, this is not something I want to trust with all our data!! Because of all the news reports, I had some of the contents backed up onto a usb drive – yes, backing up a backup device – but all our collected movies and some tv shows are long gone. It could have been a disaster, but in this case it’s just a large inconvenience.
I can’t recommend anyone get a time capsule. It’s design – mostly it’s lack of cooling – make it unfit for the purpose it was sold. If you want Apple gear, get an Airport Extreme and an external hard drive. The performance will most likely be better, and it’s not going to blow up on you.
</grump>
I’ve been using a Netgear NAS for the last few months and love it. It’s obviously not as elegant as the Time Capsule, and doesn’t have the built-in router, but it can do Time Machine backups, as well as other file sharing protocols (NFS, CIFS, AFP, FTP, etc, etc…) Mine has two drives (mirrored) and sends out email alerts if it discovers any bad blocks on the drives. The NAS can also download torrents, and can stream music/photos/videos through DLNA or as a shared iTunes Library. You can buy the NAS diskless and then shop around for the cheapest hard drive prices – mine has two 1.5TB drives which were the best value for money at the time. I highly recommend it!
Airport Extreme with a 1TB external drive is what I’ve.
The Airport Extreme lacks the cooling as well, but… it’s just a wifi router, no moving parts.
The only thing I don’t like is that wifi transfer is still pretty slow, I don’t know if it’s a configuration problem of mine setup or something else.
How could you ever trust the device? With a single hard drive, it’s only good till the hard drive pops, witch it will, by virtue of being used.
So as a backup device it’s suited to the task (as long as it’s price point is ok), as central storage it’s completely wrong device for the task, unless to back-up your storage, as it sounds you may have done. But you don’t need to back-up the back-up, just the single location data (movies).
Remember have a back-up increases your rate of failure, but decreases critical failure rates.
@stuart: yup, the netgear ones are nice. I like the G-Tech ones (apple also sells them, but amazon is cheaper): RAID, small, look nice, Firewire+USB+Esata. But I have a TC now :(
@simo: thats what I would have preferred, but apple only replace with the same thing (well, the same “level” – they dont do 500gb anymore, so I got the lowest one – 1TB)
@simeon: the HDD was never the problem. It was the power supply that went. Because of a lot of other people with the same problem, I had done a backup about a week before (the data doesn’t change often), but I didn’t have space to backup everything!
Apple does provide an archive button, which is nice :) But I didn’t have a 500GB disk spare.
So now it’s be holding our machine backups, and maybe some other stuff, which will also exist in at least one other place (mac mini most likely).
I would totally recommend offsite backups, it misses the integration of the timecapsule but you never have to worry about theft or natural disaster again (except global nuclear war perhaps =))
The critisims I have seen levelled against the timecapsule is it uses a basic oem drive that has no hope of lasting like a commercial service.
Cloudbased timecapsule? Apples datacenters must be ready by now?
I like the IDEA of an offsite backup, but at 0.3meg/sec, it’s going to take MONTHS to move all the data up there. DSL upstream speeds in the UK are SLOW. Not to mention, if I was in NZ, the issue of data cap!
As for a cloud-based TC – well, macminicolo does exactly that, so I guess it works :)
+1 to what simeon said.
data doesn’t really exist unless there are two copies of it.
Good point Dan. I had two (or more) copies of most things, just not a few of the movies. Oh, well – I’m sure I can source them again :)