With the release of the new Airport Extremes and Time Capsules I am looking to purchase one or the other. I currently have a mac and pc environment and am looking for a universal backup solution. My question is - should I go with the Airport Extreme and then buy a NAS for storage or should I just go with the all-in-one solution with the Time Capsule. Any pros/cons to either route? Thanks.
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Need Recommendation: Airport Extreme & Nas or Time Capsule?
- Thread starter Robdmb
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i too, havent made a decision yet:
- Time capsule with USB hub connecting to printer and 1 HDD (2 hds one for time machine and the other for wireless file access)
- Airport Extreme with usb hub connecting to printer and 2 HDDs (2 hds one for time machine and the other for wireless file access)
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TC is probably the way to go if there aren't reliability problems like the last generation. But that is probably a big if. I'm leaning toward TC, but that is partly because I want to tuck it away in a corner on a book shelf and not have a second peripheral sitting there. So it is somewhat an aesthetic decision.
I'd recommend the Extreme with NAS. TC is a single disk - no RAID - greater chance of data loss due to disk failure. Plus, today's NAS devices do much more than just serve up disk space....take a look at the Synology 2 or 4 bay products, they'll stream media, do torrents, connect to IP webcams - all without a computer having to be powered up.
Default is the 1-drive redundancy, so if you have 4 drives you can have 1 fail and still all the data will be fine. You can specify manual raid levels too. And yes, you can backup anything to it, including via Time Machine.
It is for 95% of people. If you house burns down your data is the least of your problems probably.
I would go with the Time Capsule. The hard drive is built right in, and I've had no problems whatsoever with mine. If you decide to get an Airport Extreme with, let's say, 2TB of storage, it's going to cost the same as a 2 TB Time Capsule. And of course the Time Capsule is smaller and a lot more portable. You can tuck it away disguised as a book in a bookshelf or something!
Also, it you get an Airport Extreme, you have to manage three wires and two devices instead of just one wire and one device. And if the hard drives falls over and the wire disconnects, you'll just stop backing up and you won't know until a week or so later when Mac OS X alerts you. And lastly, the hard drive will be connecting to the Airport Extreme through USB 2.0. That's SLOW!! Backing up and restoring from a backup will take forever! Time Capsules are much faster, and I can even use mine as a server for accessing my iTunes content instead of storing everything on my computer, it's great! The Time Capsule is the better buy in my opinion, and if for whatever reason it costs ten dollars more than the Airport Extreme and hard drive combination, it's still definitely worth it.
Also, it you get an Airport Extreme, you have to manage three wires and two devices instead of just one wire and one device. And if the hard drives falls over and the wire disconnects, you'll just stop backing up and you won't know until a week or so later when Mac OS X alerts you. And lastly, the hard drive will be connecting to the Airport Extreme through USB 2.0. That's SLOW!! Backing up and restoring from a backup will take forever! Time Capsules are much faster, and I can even use mine as a server for accessing my iTunes content instead of storing everything on my computer, it's great! The Time Capsule is the better buy in my opinion, and if for whatever reason it costs ten dollars more than the Airport Extreme and hard drive combination, it's still definitely worth it.
Have they fixed the overheating issue that was on the first generation time capsules? Disk use heats the machine up, and bulges the capacitors in the interntal power adaptor, preventing the machine from powering up.
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Time Machine backup to a HD connected to an Airport Extreme is not officially supported by Apple. And there are mixed opinions on how reliable this works.
Despite this I'm still interested in this solution
and like to hear other people's opinion on this.
Time Machine backup to a HD connected to an Airport Extreme is not officially supported by Apple. And there are mixed opinions on how reliable this works.
Despite this I'm still interested in this solution
and like to hear other people's opinion on this.