I have a new iMac showing up tomorrow...I have been using a MBP connected to an external HD for my Time Machine backup. I also keep all of my media on another external hard drive, clone it to my backup hard drive as well as in the cloud.
Is Time Capsule ONLY for Time Machine backups or can you drop/access files from the drive once setup in house. Also, I have an Actiontec Range Extender on my second floor spreading out my FiOS connection from the first floor. Would I still need the range extender? Does it have to connect via hardwire to my FiOS router? Thanks.
I can speak to the Time Capsule part of your question.
For the last 4 years I had been using my TC to backup my MBP, I also centralized all of my other files on the TC. This included: music library, software library, all of my personal files, plus I used it as a backup destination for a Win 7 desktop and as a print server.
Although you can drop/access files on the drive, the one thing that always bothered me was that it was SLOW and trying to edit a file in real time was impossible, I would have to copy a file local, edit it and then copy it back when I was done. I had no problem streaming music from the TC to a Sonos system.
The other thing I was not happy about was that it does not backup itself very well. There is only one way and that is to perform an archive, which will copy the whole TC to a second drive plugged into it via USB. This archive is not customizable, it does everything or nothing (no incremental backups) and it took up to 12 hours to complete, during which time you cannot access the TC.
Don’t get me wrong, I have been pleased with the TC (and I still use it as a Time Machine destination and as a router), but as it is now 4 years old I was starting to get concerned that I did not have another up to date backup of everything that was stored on it (because the archive process took so long I was only performing this perhaps once every 3 - 4 months).
Maybe they have improved some of these aspects of the TC since I purchased mine. But, I would suspect that is not the case, if Apple improved any of these features then you would have a good, cheap server and I am sure that they would rather have you buy another system as a dedicated server (of course, that is my cynical side talking).
