rob_himself Posted April 12, 2008 Report Share Posted April 12, 2008 Evening all Quite fancy getting a hold of one of these for backup/storage....question is does anyone have them and are they actually any good? Is there something simmilar on the market without the apple logo thats cheaper? Also - the 1tb version or the 500mb. At the moment I think i could fill, say, 300gb. Is it worth the extra for the 1tb, or would it be better to get a 500gb one then add a new USB HD to it down the line when i need it? Decisions decisions..... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DHA Posted April 12, 2008 Report Share Posted April 12, 2008 I'm not sure if you can add an additional drive at a later date to the time machine. I will be getting one as my current airport is about 4 years old and only supports a printer connected via usb and not an external drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ritey Posted April 12, 2008 Report Share Posted April 12, 2008 I haven't got one yet, but plan to either this month or next depending on finances. Probably go for the 1T as I think its better value? I bet there are other devices on the market cheaper but Apple kit working with Apple kit generally works best imo Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rob_himself Posted April 12, 2008 Author Report Share Posted April 12, 2008 I'm not sure if you can add an additional drive at a later date to the time machine. I will be getting one as my current airport is about 4 years old and only supports a printer connected via usb and not an external drive. Seemingly it supports an additional USB drive plugged into it. Wonder if it'll support a usb hub providing printer and additional drive sharing? I bet there are other devices on the market cheaper but Apple kit working with Apple kit generally works best imo Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
burble Posted April 12, 2008 Report Share Posted April 12, 2008 They're crap - complete and utter crap. I'm on my third one and that'll be going back for a refund on Monday. When they work, they work very well and I can't complain at all about the wireless side of things but the storage side of it is utter crap. The problem I'm facing is that every couple of days it'll get its knickers in a twist and somehow corrupt one of the incremental backups. The net result is that you then can't do any further incremental backups and most of the time when the backup starts the Time Capsule will crash and reboot. The "solution" that Apple keep proposing is that I erase the backup disc and start again. Great - so what if I needed to restore from a backup? The other suggestion from Apple is to change the wireless channel but they don't seem to get the point that it fecks up even when I'm connected using Ethernet and have the wireless disabled. Next suggestion was that I should reinstall Leopard on my MacBook because it was doing "something to corrupt the incremental backups" but it does the exact same thing if I have the Mini backing up rather than the MacBook. On the question of the USB ports, apparently you can plug a hub in to use a printer and an external HD. I'm going to ditch the Time Capsule and use Time Machine onto my TeraStation pro. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mac Posted April 13, 2008 Report Share Posted April 13, 2008 Mate, my biggest issue with the TC, and the reason I haven't bought one, is that the backup images are stored in spares-disk images and these are notorious for fecking up. Why backup to something that's even more unreliable than the source :confused: Also, the drives are listed as 'server' type drives. They are simply not - the one we have to **** about with at work has Deskstar drives in it FFS. They lie I have an Airport Extreme which has a couple of external drives and a printer plugged into and it works fine. You can get time-machine to work over but but in effect you have the same issues with sparse-images. Also, AE+1TB disk is cheaper than 1TB TC. Personally, I wouldn't touch TC for regular backups, it's just not good enough. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ritey Posted April 13, 2008 Report Share Posted April 13, 2008 Thanks for helping me save money I don't have then guys Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Se5aScott Posted April 13, 2008 Report Share Posted April 13, 2008 Hasn't there been a recent software update? I seem to recall one in the past week or so and I am pretty sure that it mentioned time cap/machine bug fixes Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
burble Posted April 14, 2008 Report Share Posted April 14, 2008 There was an update released to 7.3.1 a few weeks ago but if anything that made the piece of crap even less reliable. Quite often I have to downgrade to 7.3.0 to be able to erase the disc and then upgrade again to 7.3.1 to have the wireless working reliably. Seriously - do yourself a favour and don't buy a Time Capsule. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mac Posted April 14, 2008 Report Share Posted April 14, 2008 That release works on the AE as well - still sparse images, still not good enough IMHO. It's a shame really - the idea is a great one, just badly implemented. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
burble Posted April 14, 2008 Report Share Posted April 14, 2008 I agree, it is a great idea but the bad implementation of it has put me off using future such products from Apple again. That said, it is possibly my own fault for buying 1st generation Apple hardware. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mac Posted April 14, 2008 Report Share Posted April 14, 2008 Actually if you just using it as an 802.11n base station it's actually pretty good although expensive. Like I say an AE+1Tb drive is cheaper and works much the same. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DHA Posted April 15, 2008 Report Share Posted April 15, 2008 Can you backup 2 macs to the one drive with just the time machine software? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mac Posted April 15, 2008 Report Share Posted April 15, 2008 You can but it's not good practice really. Set up two partitions on the same drive and select the opposing partition for each Mac would be a better option. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rachel Posted April 16, 2008 Report Share Posted April 16, 2008 In all honesty - use Carbon Copy Cloner (it's free!) to run up a mirror of your HDD to an external firewire disc. A lot less painful, and a lot cheaper option IMHO. Or just do what I do - use a fw disc and just copy those files/directories to it I want to back up. :D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
burble Posted April 16, 2008 Report Share Posted April 16, 2008 Carbon Copy Cloner That's the puppy! A friend mentioned a program to me a few weeks ago that was good for backups but I couldn't remember what it was called. Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mac Posted April 16, 2008 Report Share Posted April 16, 2008 In all honesty - use Carbon Copy Cloner (it's free!) to run up a mirror of your HDD to an external firewire disc. A lot less painful, and a lot cheaper option IMHO.Or just do what I do - use a fw disc and just copy those files/directories to it I want to back up. :D Yes but Rachel how often are you going to run that? My laptop for example has a 320Gb drive, 270Gb full. CCC takes yonks to run. Timemachine to an external FW drive is proper fast and unobtrusive - and I can go back to a file if I've stuffed something up. Manually copying files for a backup is an option of course - I use Robocopy on my Windows PC - but it's not something that just happens and therefore happens less often. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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