Apple Time Capsule MB277LL/A (AirPort Extreme Plus 1 TB Storage)
by Apple Computer
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List Price: Our Price: $184.99 You Save: $315.00 (63%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: CE See more product details |
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Apple Time Capsule MB277LL/A (AirPort Extreme Plus 1 TB Storage)
Customer Review: Works great! Really Easy to Setup
Summary: 5 Stars
Very easy to setup, works great!
It appears to use about 13 watts on standby and 19 watts when active.
Customer Review: Great Service
Summary: 5 Stars
Great seller . . . Fast and friendly . . . Very good price as well. I am very well pleased!Customer Review: Great router, good network disk, decent backup device
Summary: 4 Stars
This product is basically three products: an airport extreme wireless router, a networked drive, and finally, with Leopard, a networked backup system. Overall, it's a very good product, but there are some serious limitation one should be aware of.
As a router, it is fantastic. Typical Apple ease of use, with all configuration done by a very intuitive GUI application.
Unfortunately, it's not a great network drive. The drive appears to be internally connected using a very slow USB connection. You will find that even with a computer connected via Gb/s ethernet, transfer speeds will be limited to around 5-6 MB/s, tops. If you connect two Macs via fast ethernet, you can often get over 40 MB/s transfer speeds, so this is a rather large disappointment, especially for a device which will be getting a lot of use if you use Time Machine.
Time Machine is great in theory, but has a few issues. First, it is a file-based differential backup. That means if even a single bit of a 1 GB file is changed, the ENTIRE file gets backed up. Not only does this take a lot of time, it quickly depletes your backup drive because the same data is added to the disk every regular backup. To get around this, you have to explicitly exclude backing up such files. Good candidates for exclusion are Mail and iDisk caches, as well as virtual machine disk images.
There have also been numerous reports of Time Machine backups being susceptible to corruption. I've experienced this once, myself, after a backup was cancelled, so I can vouch that it happens. However, the problems can often be fixed by deleting the last backup. The next backup will take a long time as the computer must scan the full disk again, but the backups then continue on normally after that.
Time Machine backups have their place, and come in very handy to recover accidentally deleted files. However, they should only be considered part of a larger backup scheme. They probably shouldn't be trusted for a full recovery, and won't be of any help if your computer's drive completely fails, anyway. (How are you going to run Time Machine if you can't boot your computer?) As such, you should image your entire drive regularly, in addition to using Time Machine.
Customer Review: Works well, easy to set up and compact enough to keep anywhere.
Summary: 4 Stars
I bought the Time Capsule after losing all my data by not backing up using Time Machine. It was a necessary purchase, I thought, because losing your data is never a fun time. I've come to be happy about the day that I decided to buy it, because it serves its purpose and more. Let's start with the basics.
* It's a 1 TB hard drive. Not only is it usable as a backup for your time machine enabled Mac, it doubles as a wireless storage device that you can access from anywhere on your network.
* It's a 802.11n wireless and wired router. It pumps out a rather large wireless internet signal that'll probably fill your house with full bars. It's also got ethernet jacks in the back for wired connections.
* It's easy to set up with a Mac. Very easy, in fact. It's nearly plug-and-play. You can back up MULTIPLE macs on it.
Now, here's the catch: I haven't tried backing up on a PC, and when using a PC with it, I couldn't find the drive on the network. I'm not a PC genius, mind you, and there are probably some documents on the apple support site that tell you how to set it up with a PC, but I couldn't figure it out in my 15 minutes of attempting to get it to work. I'm sure I could have had I tried a bit harder, though.
It is to note, though, that if you have a boot-camp enabled Mac, you CAN choose to back up the windows drive from the Mac side. This is very comforting, as I wouldn't want to lose the little PC data that I have as well in the event of a Windows crash (which tend to be more often than Mac crash).
Another downside is that it uses the wireless bandwidth to back up the computer(s), slowing down online performance slightly. This may not be a problem for many, but for avid downloaders and gamers, it might.
The final downside is, of course, the price, but if you can pony up the money, it'll pay for itself after the first crash when all your data is safely on the Time Capsule, ready for transfer.
Customer Review: Does What It Says, But...
Summary: 4 Stars
It's easy, wireless backup of all your Macs running Leopard. Yep. My only complaints are with speed - you may be able to convince me this is because it's taking it's time making sure the backup is done properly. Whatever. Anyway, I would certainly recommend this to people running multiple Macs. The good and bad:
Pros:
EASY - I followed the default settings from the setup assistant and was up and running in 5 minutes.
Syncing with my Apple TV and copying files via "n" wireless is great, about 9MB/sec. My "g" router was about 2.6MB/sec.
Cons:
Some Speed issues -
File copying via gigabit Ethernet was slow too - 12MB/sec through Time Capsule vs 25MB/sec when my MacBook was directly connected to my Mac Pro.
Backups via gigabit Ethernet were slow to - about 5 MB/sec. Maybe the Time Capsule was doing other things to ensure my backup was properly done, don't know.
Wireless backups from laptops do work except I was disappointed to discover it only backs up when the laptop is plugged in. Not a deal breaker, but a disappointment.
Apple recommends you let the first backup run uninterrupted. Something hard for me to do because I like to fiddle with it as it's running. But it did work as expected, just slower than expected.
It's still the easiest and best backup tool out there. Just do it.