What do you think of the Apple Time Capsule?

As far as I know, Time Capsule is a service built in to all newer Macs; I didn’t have to buy Time Capsule itself, just an external hard drive. I designated it as a Time Capsule device, and the program did its own thing.

As far as I know, it pretty much just copies every single file on your computer to the external device in folders, where you can access them later. Those folders should easily be accessible from other computers.

Sorry I can’t tell you more; although I do use Time Capsule for backup, I’ve never had to do much with it beyond plugging in my external HD and let it copy my files.

@ParaParaYukiko I believe you are confusing it with the Time Machine software.

For those that have a single smallish hard drive and are willing to pay a premium for total automation, the Time Capsule isn’t a bad deal really. Granted, you could just get a larger external hard drive and back up manually with the Time Machine software, but some people (myself not included) could benefit from the Time Capsule as it simplifies their lives and prevents them from having to learn anything about computers in order to use them, which is the Apple way.

I find the storage rather anemic for network use with multiple computers (our home LAN has over 3TB across three computers) and the 2GB is horribly overpriced when you consider that a competent builder could make a NAS RAID with far more storage for less, though it would be bulkier so I suppose that the compactness may be worth the cost to some. (Personally, I just shove stuff in the closet when I don’t want to look at it, but I am weird.)

@ParaParaYukiko :: Time Capsule and Time Machine are different. Time Machine is the software that works with any drive. Time Capsule is a wifi enabled hard drive Apple sells that talks to time machine. It does the same but over wifi.

And Time Capsule will not work with Windows without some tedious hacks and 3rd party software. I would not suggest getting it if you have Windows machines. But it works fantastic for backing up multiple Macs on a network with WiFi.

@blah_blah Multiple Macs? Maybe if all you have is Macbooks.

Time Capsule seems pretty neat—I’ve thought about getting one myself—but it’s kind of expensive. I find that Airport Express is a quality router and having an off-site backup solution (in my case Backblaze, for $5/month) gives me plenty of peace of mind. Having both of those makes it hard for me to justify getting a Time Capsule.

I found them to be quite expensive and wound up getting a LaCie external drive for much less.

Time capsule is great if you have mcbooks or macbook pros. For backing up a fixed desktop computer, just attach an external drive or a wired NAS that supports apple file system.

The latter would be my preference, anyway, since it will allow you to go beyond 1TB of network space and still create a proper RAID setup that will prevent from consequences of harddrive faillure in your backup system.

If all you own is one or two OSX laptops with both not more than 500GB it works very well out of the box and offers a great back up solution for anyone that is stopped from backing up because of technical hurdles.

It also functions as a very decent wireless gateway/router/accesspoint with gigabit.

I agree with what a lot of folks suggest here.

The Time Machine feature built into Mac OS X is dead simple to use. Connect an external hard drive to your Mac, tell Time Machine to use it for backups and you’re good to go. The fact that the Time Machine utility is available from within many applications is the killer feature.

Did you accidentally delete an email? Just hit the Time Machine icon and watch the magic. You can scroll back in time, find the lost email and restore it from within your Mail app. That’s powerful and much, much better than attempting to restore a historic copy of the entire Mail database from some ad-hoc backup you made.

The Time Capsule router + hard drive is also great. It offers a server-grade hard drive for extra reliability and it’s really nice to have if you’ve got a portable machine – like a MacBook or MacBook Pro – where you don’t want to plug in a plethora of cables every time you bring it home. The ability to perform wireless backups without any effort and almost no configuration is worth the relatively high price for many folks.

However, Time Capsule doesn’t really work like third-party routers that you might be familiar with. Apple does their usual trick making it “just work” in a way that can be somewhat frustrating for power users. You must install Apple’s Airport Utility software to connect/maintain the Time Capsule, for example (they do offer Mac and Windows versions of it).

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All that said, Time Machine (working with Time Capsule or other disk) just provides a single layer of backup redundancy. Your disaster recovery planning should also include disk cloning on a regular basis as well. For the Mac, you can use SuperDuper!, CarbonCopyCloner, or even the Mac’s builtin UNIX features to accomplish this task. Make sure that you clone once per week or so and store your cloned disk image off site just in case of catastrophe.

Oh, and see the Specs for Time Capsule.

It’s not compatible with Windows-based PCs for Time Machine backups… since Time Machine is only a Mac OS X feature available on Apple Mac computers.

But in every other way, yes it is compatible with Windows-based PCs for wi-fi, printer sharing, hard drive access, etc.

We got a 1T Time Capsule a couple of years ago. I have a MacBook Pro and my husband uses Vista on a PC. It worked great for a little over a year – I used Time Machine to back up, and he could access separate files stored on the disk (not a supported usage, by the way). It died with no warning. Apparently a LOT of Time Capsules died with no warning (see here), to the point where my local Apple Store replaced it (after examining it), even though it was a little over a year old. We don’t use the replacement Time Capsule for backup, now. We use it for networking (works better than anything else I’ve tried for networking Macs and PCs) and for file sharing and printer sharing on the network. Not sure how long the replacement is going to last, since it is the same model that had the instant death problem, but when it goes I’ll probably just keep the new non-Apple hard drives I bought (mine works great with Time Machine, and is faster since it’s connected via USB instead of wirelessly) and just get the Apple networking setup without the hard drive.

Apple says they have fixed the problem, but the Time Capsules are pretty expensive for what you get.

@llewis To add on, it’s the power supplies that fail in them. From what I gather the rest of the unit is fine… or as fine as it can be without power.

@jerv – Yes, I think they overheat. But it was without any warning. One minute it was fine, the next it was dead. At Apple they told me they could not recover the hard drive. Not sure if it was just that it wasn’t free, or what.

@llewis I’ve seen what is possible with hard drive recovery and am now rather skeptical (or more skeptical, since regular skepticism is a natural state for me.) I’ve lost power supplies and never suffered a hard drive failure as a result; I am inclined to believe that there is more to this than I’ve read so far.

@jerv The problem wasn’t merely a faulty power supply, it was a heat problem, that lead to early demise by some parts in the TC. In most cases, the power supply was the part that died first. That doesn’t exclude the chance of @llewis’ TC was suffering a hard drive failure. The life span of hard drives also shortens because of heat.

@whitenoise As I said, more to it than I have read. Thanks for the info.

@jerv ”(or more skeptical, since regular skepticism is a natural state for me.) ” :) me, too, actually!

I don’t know what failed on my TC. I just know I was an idiot, and had photos on it that I had not backed up anywhere else (never got a round tuit – man, gotta get one of those things), so I was REALLY unhappy when it died. They told me they couldn’t recover it, but they were busy, this was a free replacement, it could have just been a way to get me to go away. And the supported use of the TC does not involve using it for both Time Machine backups and external file storage.

I was pleased that Apple replaced it without charge, even though it was out of warranty. But I won’t trust that product again, although they have supposedly corrected the overheating problem. I use the replacement primarily for networking & printer sharing, with some shared storage (because it works great for sharing large files between the Mac and the PC), but not of anything we can’t replace.

I’ve noticed that my Time Capsule gets really warm, too. While there’s a fan, it seems inadequate to the task of cooling it. (Apparently it only comes on if the device is overheating… not at all during normal operations.)

So one thing I’ve done is to place little pegs under the Time Capsule to raise it up off the surface it’s sitting on which allows air to circulate under it as well.

I think I remember reading somewhere that keeping it on its side is really bad for heat dissipation, too.

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Here’s a how-to guide explaining a rather involved procedure to get a fan working on it all the time. I’d think it’d just be easier some mini desktop fan pointed at the thing, though.