Apple's Time Capsule
I bought Apple’s Time Capsule a few months ago to replace multiple hard drives connected to my Airport Basestation. I had constant problems with the Airport’s stability. Adding disk traffic on top of that seemed to make the problem much worse. So I figured it was worth the extra change to upgrade to the Time Capsule.
For the past three months I’ve only been using it as network storage, migrating my data I want available to all my Macs, like music, movies, photos, etc to it. After I lost my Keychain on all my Macs earlier this month, I figured it was about time I started taking backups more seriously. This weekend I finally setup the automatic Time Machine, which I have to say works pretty damn well. It is completely and utterly painless to keep automated backups wirelessly.
I’ve only setup Time Machine to a connected disk before, which I wasn’t very routine about doing. So my amazement might just be from really using Apple’s software for the first time.
The first Time Capsule backup happened automatically, so I was a little unprepared for it. As one might expect the initial backup took some time—like 12 hours to back up 40 Gb—but the overall impact to my wireless traffic was barely noticeable while I performing it. Had I known when it was going to start the first backup I would have connected via ethernet.
But the real magic is in the little updates. Every once in a while I notice the Time Machine menu item spinning. And I see it upload 30-50 Mb at a time. Each incremental backup tends to be pretty small and therefore very fast.
The Time Capsule is doing a good job of managing disk space. One of my worries was that it would fill the disk with a ton of backup snapshots. But so far everything is in one neat file. Even with the incrementals, its size isn’t growing as fast as I thought it might.
At any rate, whether its Time Machine or Time Capsule or a combination of both. I’m quite happy with the sense of security that all my data is finally being backed up.
Page 1 of 1
