Best Time Machine Setup

[DAJSuperDawg]

Sorry if already posted or asked. Here's what I have.

Airport Extreme - in the basement with a gigabit switch to add connections. Serves rMBP (wired) as well as a Windows PC (wired) and 2 iPads via wireless (of course).

Airport Express - on mail level. Serves as a wireless extender.

What should I use to do a TimeMachine backup?

Get a TimeCapsule or just add a large external HDD to the Airport Extreme.

Any thoughts would be appreciative. Pretty new to the OS and iOS world. Love my new rMBP and iPad's. Just can't get my parents (elderly) to move over to the Mac world. Will probably never happen, so I can stop wishing.

Thanks,

David

 

[Lahmy88]

I think you answered it best yourself

or just add a large external HDD to the Airport Extreme

This way will allow you to easily pick which size you want at a good price. Although a USB2 drive won't saturate your Gigabit Ethernet bandwidth, you won't notice too much for only incremental backups. But if ya wanna spend the dosh for a little extra speed, then buy a Gigabit Ethernet NAS device such as the Time Capsule. Not sure how much speed difference it will actually make, but if it makes ya feel better lol

 

[zhenya]

It's worth noting that a drive connected to the Airport Extreme may work, but is not an officially supported Time Machine destination.

 

[MCAsan]

In the States you can get a Seagate 3TB USB 3 external drive with 2 year warranty from Costco for $139. I am sure you can find other good deals at NewEgg, Amazon...etc.

 

[StanleyYelnats]

I have 5 macs....

I bought a Time Capsule. The router works great.

The back up process not so good. Fo Me anyway.

I'm abandoning the time capsule as a centralized backup.

The time machine works OK, but over wireless to time capsule?????

I going to use an eternal hard drive on fire wire connected to each computer and use the time capsule as a net work hard drive.

I'm not impressed with the time capsule as a back tool. If you are backing up text files maybe. Video and photos????

 

[Mike in Kansas]

As another poster stated, attaching a hard drive to an Airport Extreme MAY work for TM, but it's not officially supported by Apple. You CAN add a hard drive to a Time Capsule, and that IS supported for TM backups. There is a difference in speed - when you are writing to the integrated hard drive in the Time Capsule, you are using SATA2; when you are writing to an attached hard drive, you are connected via USB2; quite a bit slower.

I have a 2TB Time Capsule backing up 3 Macs and it has been flawless from the day I installed it. One of my Macs is filled with photos and videos, and I've been able to retrieve files without a problem from the TC. I just retrieved an entire iTunes Library (20GB) as I accidentally messed mine up. I have a hard drive attached to the Time Capsule and am using that as an archive for things like installation disk images, copies of apps that I have installed, etc.

All in all, I've had a great experience with the TC; it performs better as a router than my 2 year old LinkSys as well.