Anyone got Apple Time Capsule (& Leopard Time Machine)

[Frances144]

I have a Maxtor firewire external hard drive which is nearly full.  I know I can bung stuff onto dvd for storage but some of my films are too big for that.

I think I want a wireless external hard drive that I can keep back-ups of all the Apple computers in the house (3 iBooks and 1 iMac) plus my films and photography stuff and my huge iTunes library.  This would free-up masses of space on my iMac that is suffering from the iTunes library.

So, any recommendations?  I saw the Apple Time Capsule thing.  I don't have Leopard - is it any good?  I am happy enough with 10.4.11 but as I did lose my website the other day when I threw it away (accident), would Leopard Time Machine have saved my life?

Thanks
Frances

[Paddy]

Yes, Time Machine would no doubt have saved you on the web site issue. Of course, so would regular (nightly) backups to any external drive using SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner, but those wouldn't be wireless.

Time Capsule looks like a pretty cool product - and most people writing in the review section of the Apple store seem pretty happy with it. There are a lot of tips in those reviews that cover some of the problems people had with initial setup (mostly it would seem due to not completely understanding what they were doing and AppleCare support people not having the answers they needed to solve the problems).

Tempting for me too, though I've just bought a bunch of 500GB drives and can't justify yet another one...YET.

[Xairbusdriver]

Not sure that Time Capsule transfer speeds would be as fast as FW800. But the biggest disadvantage, IMHO,  is that it cannot be used as a boot volume. You need the Airport parts up and running before you can access the drive and that doesn't happen until quite late in the boot up routines, apparently. The price is not too far off for a 1TB external drive and it does have the Apple type plug 'n play, use setup but external drives are easily handled/accessed by the OS (even Tiger), anyway. My setup was destroyed near the end of March so my current backup is only about 45 days. It is 72.6+ GB. But I don't do video or music work as you do so you'd likely have a somewhat larger back up in the same time frame.

The biggest advantage seems to be the extra ports and the Airport router that could be used to connect other Macs in the house. Of course, most external housing can be bought with extra FW and USB ports, also.

[Gregg]

I guess we'll be a wireless society before we're a paperless society.

Time Capsule seems to be the cutting edge external drive these days. But, isn't that the reputation Apple is cultivating? Another hit in the making, perhaps.