Time Capsule + Macbook Air = Huge Mistake

Man, thanks a lot for this post!

I was just going to buy a Time Capsule (which is expensive, right?) but now I am going to buy My Book Studio 2TB Firewire 800!

I hate backup using USB because its too slow, so I wonder how slow it would be to backup 500gb over the air using Time Capsule!

Sometimes I ask myself: why so many people are selling their Time Capsules on ebay and other sites? Now I know...

Why can't you return the time capsule? I thought there was a 14 day return policy...

I think you are just plain wrong. TC + MBA is a spectacular combination.

Who cares how slow it takes to make your initial backup. Your MBA only has a 256GB disk... so worst case, you go to bed and it is finished in the morning. After that first backup... incremental backups take very little time. You generally never notice they are occurring.

Compare that to any direct attached HDD. It only backs up when you physically attach the drive. Bad idea.

Finally... keeping your iTunes library on the same device as your backup drive is also wrong in so many ways.

My recommendation: Keep your TC and use it exclusively for backup, put your iTunes data on some different media... and make sure that get's backed up as well.

Personally... I use one TC for backing up our 2TB iMac... and a second TC for backing up all of our MBA's and MBP's. It works flawlessly.

/Jim

flynz4 said:

I think you are just plain wrong. TC + MBA is a spectacular combination.

Who cares how slow it takes to make your initial backup. Your MBA only has a 256GB disk... so worst case, you go to bed and it is finished in the morning. After that first backup... incremental backups take very little time. You generally never notice they are occurring.

Compare that to any direct attached HDD. It only backs up when you physically attach the drive. Bad idea.

Finally... keeping your iTunes library on the same device as your backup drive is also wrong in so many ways.

My recommendation: Keep your TC and use it exclusively for backup, put your iTunes data on some different media... and make sure that get's backed up as well.

Personally... I use one TC for backing up our 2TB iMac... and a second TC for backing up all of our MBA's and MBP's. It works flawlessly.

/Jim

Click to expand...

Yeah I have to +1 this. I'm not usually quick to poo-poo someone's implementation within their own network, but I think there are other solutions you could use here that would make the combo much better.


1. USB 2.0 isn't the limiting part of the Apple USB-to-Ethernet adapter. The 100Mbps is.

2. Even if your Air was maxed with a 256GB SSD, transferring over USB2.0 at a modest 20MB/s should take only 3.5 hours. So if you got a USB-to-Gigabit adapter instead of Apple's, that would help. Then every subsequent Time Machine interaction should only be several MB or maybe 1 or 2 GB depending on how frequently you backup, taking much less time.

3. I sure hope you have your Capsule + Air set up to be connected at 5GHz rather than 2.4GHz.

4. Anandtech just reviewed the new Time Capsule and Airport Extreme and rated the wireless radios as some of the best around. So while it may not have a firewire port on it, not all the technology is old. In fact it's Wireless N configuration is perfect for the new N radios on the 2011 Airs.

5. It seems the bottleneck in your chain is the Air, not whatever NAS you'd use. No matter what NAS you went with you're limited to either Wifi speeds or USB 2.0 speeds, unless you get a Thunderbolt external hard drive and connect it directly to your Air, or wait for a Thunderbolt-to-Gigabit Ethernet adapter.

I prefer Airport Extreme base station + external HDDs, so I can use some for time machine, and others for iphoto + itunes library to be accessed by the various macs in our household

urkel said:

I guess everyone has a different perspective on how to judge backup devices. Some peoples defense relies on judging the simplicity of the backup process, but I judge backup by how well it performs when you need it most. RESTORATION.

The Time Capsule does a fine job after that initial setup and you never have to think about it. But when it came to restoring a new machine the the restoration off the Time Capsule estimated 12-18hrs while the restoration off a local external super duper backup took 30minutes. Obviously having multiple sources of backup is nice, but if I only relied on the TC then I'd have missed a solid day of work.

Click to expand...

You're right -- It sounds like you bought the wrong product. It's simple math to determine that an external USB2.0 drive (or Thunderbolt drive) is going to restore from backup to a Macbook Air a lot faster than ANY Network-attached drive, NOT just a Time Capsule. As you mentioned in your first post, having that knowledge *before* the purchase would have been nice.

If having your backups be network accessible is important to you, though, then you're going to have to live with the limitations that your Air has. Wifi or USB2.0 only go so fast. That's not the Time Capsule's fault. But from the sounds of it, you already have a direct-connect external solution that, as expected, restores on an Air faster than a network connection.

My Time Capsule restored to my Mac Pro via GigE probably 4 times as fast as it did to my Air. That's expected behavior given the Air's limitations that have nothing to do with the Time Capsule.