First Impressions of Apple’s Time Capsule
3.04.2008 | Mac OS X
Ever since the iPhone, I’ve been on a mission to use more Mac products. I wouldn’t say I’ve turned into a fan boy but the electronics just work THAT well together.
Now that I’m working from home full time, I’ve moved most of my work stuff to the back room. While I get more work done than sitting at the dining room table, one unfortunate side effect is that the MBP drops the Internet connection from time to time. To be fair, any laptop sitting back here drops the connection from time to time.
To make the long story short, I debated on getting an Airport Express but with the timing of Time Capsule coming out, I opted to get a 500 gb Time Capsule instead hoping it would kill two birds with one stone. (Increased range + backup)
Here are my first impressions:
1. Setup was easy – Plug it in. Insert the CD. Pop on the Airport Utilities and within a few seconds the TC picked up an IP and the MacBook Pro saw the drive on the existing network. Had I wanted to backup then, it’d start within 15 seconds.
2. While that is good and all, I didn’t want another client on the existing network. I really wanted TC to help extend the range of the existing network so that my signal wouldn’t drop as much. So I unplugged TC, took it to the front of the house, found a network cable and put it all together. I restarted the TC, input the existing network password and within 2 minutes I extended the signal of the existing network AND added a 500 gb drive to our network.
With Time Machine flipped on, I started the backup… life is good. This sure beats me having to manually highlight directories (when I can remember to do it), and copy and paste it onto the existing network drive. Yeah, I’m lazy, what can I say?
3. Overall, Time Capsule seems to offer all the options I would want in the hardware. You can add an external hard drive and add more capacity for backups, you can add a printer or you can add a USB hub and go crazy.
Some things that troubled me:
1. I can’t tell if I’m on the old g network or the new n network. Since I’m extending the old network, does this mean I’m still on wireless g or does the network also have wireless n that is also available for me to connect to? So far my connection hasn’t dropped today so that’s a good sign – but I think my 4 month old laptop can utilize the n; I’m just not sure that it is.
2. With TC doing the initial 90 gig backup, my left palm/wrist has been burning up with the hard drive being accessed all day. Hopefully this isn’t a permanent problem.
3. My laptop apparently fell asleep while I went out for a meeting. Upon my return, the backup process had crashed and didn’t resume at full speed. Hopefully by adjusting some settings on the MBP, this backup will finish within the next day but I had to kill the initial backup file and start over to get it to copy files at the faster speed.
Overall, I would recommend the purchase. It’s probably a better idea for extreme mission critical data to use additional backup options but for the daily users who worry about lost documents or bad iterations, the basic Time Machine software should help alleviate those minor headaches. Most of my stuff are also backed up on our dev server, live servers and google apps so I don’t think I will lose anything too important (knock on wood) since they’re all over the place.
I won’t lie… this does provide me a peace of mind and I wish this technology were around a few years ago when I had major drive crashes and had lost data. Better late than never though.
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