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Do you use Time Machine and What Drive do you use?

S

scott9s

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 27, 2008
86
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I've searched the forums, I see a lot of posts about Time Machine and USB Drives from 2007 when Leopard first came out, but I'm wondering now that time machine is out and people have used it a while if people have changed opinions.

What do you use for Time Machine?

I'm looking for an external drive or NAS to use as my macbook pro backup.

If you read reviews at the apple store, people are not fond of the Time Capsule. So, I was thinking of just using an airport express with a USB Drive connected. Has anyone had success with that?

What USB Drive do people recommend? If you don't use Time Machine, what do you use?
 
I reccomend Seagate and Western Digital drives, but it usually comes down to personal preference and experience. Seagate offers 5-year warranty which I like and I have never had an issue with any of their drives. Lacie drives have been rated fairly high as well, however keep in mind Lacie is not a drive manufacturer.

As for backing up, Time Machine is nice, but I don't like the lack of control you have over it. I also do not require mulitple versions of my files archived (although I totally understand cases where people do) so for me I simply back-up my Mac using SuperDuper. Carbon Copy Cloner is another excellent app. They both allow you to create a bootable back-up of your system as well, whereas Time Machine does not.
 
I've been using a 1TB FireWire/USB Seagate external hard drive where I bought the hard drive and enclosure separate. It's worked exceedingly well for me since I got it early/mid last year. I would also recommend the Seagate hard drives because of the warranty and reliability, of all of the hard drives that I've used I've found the Seagate hard drives to be most reliable.
 
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The Airport Express with a USB drive connected will not work with Time Machine. The first thing is that the USB port on the airport express is really only for printers. The second thing is that many people have tried using the airport extreme base station with an external USB HD without any luck. I've heard of some people that were actually able to get it to work buttgey are few and far between and they probably had to do done major hacks to get it done.

This is just the way that I understand it. I could be wrong.

On another note, I do have a time capsule and haven't had any problems with it. I back up a desktop and a laptop to it and it seems to work fine.
 
I use a LaCie Poulton 1TB USB 2.0/FireWire/eSATA Hard Disk.

I chose it because the price was pretty good (£127 at the Apple Store), it has Firewire 400, and it looks great.
hd_poultondesktop_triple_3.jpg
 
scott9s said:
So, I was thinking of just using an airport express with a USB Drive connected. Has anyone had success with that?
Click to expand...

My success with Airport disks as time machine backup targets has been intermittent, and intermittent success doesn't cut it for backups.

I am using a LaCie FW800/FW400/USB RAID drive for backups. It's has 2 1TB drives that are configured as 1TB of RAID 1. It is normally left connected to my Macbook Pro, which serves as a desktop unless I take it with me when I travel. The drive has 3 partitions - one for the MBP and one for a Macbook on which bootable clones are maintained, and another hosting a time machine backup for the MBP, an iTunes library, and other files.

I prefer firewire to USB as the performance benefits are substantial.
 
I use Time Machine to only backup my iPhoto album and I use it with a WD MyBook 500GB (Firewire and USB 2.0 version) external HD. I bought the external HD a little over 3 years ago. My external HD is connected to my Airport Extreme Base Station.
 
I have two Seagate External Drives. I use TM to backup my Mac and my 750GB drive to 1TB. It works, well despite the slow speeds. I can deal with the speed though because I have had one to many HD failure scares. I would go with either a Seagate or WD drive, and would recommend your own external drive over the TC because then you can easily swap it out.

I think my next drive will be WD My Book Studio 1TB, they've gotten good reviews and FW800 is tempting.
 
problems with time capsule

Time Capsule does not mount on my desktop and the Time Machine backup runs but does not find Time Capsule. Should I reset in some way?:eek:
 
I use TM to backup my iMac (sadly the MB isn't backed up). I use an OWC Mercury Elite-AL running two 500 GB drives in Raid 0. (I know, Raid 0 is bad...). It's quick with FW800. It was a pricey enclosure, but well worth it to have the aesthetics of a matching case, and the speed of FW800.

All around a good product in my book, and works flawlessly connected with FW400, FW800, USB connected to the iMac, or USB connected to the airport (no time capsule on the airport though).
 
I use the TC with 2 Seagate Pro eSATA, USB Firewire options. Backups are done with one firewire Seagate to the tower. Wirless with the second seagate attached to the TC. Works fine and I will never lose 100 converted DVD's again:D
 
I prefer SuperDuper since you can boot off of your backups on another mac. My friend uses a portable 2.5" western digital drive. 250gb for $100 from best buy.
 
~Shard~ said:
As for backing up, Time Machine is nice, but I don't like the lack of control you have over it. I also do not require mulitple versions of my files archived (although I totally understand cases where people do) so for me I simply back-up my Mac using SuperDuper. Carbon Copy Cloner is another excellent app. They both allow you to create a bootable back-up of your system as well, whereas Time Machine does not.
Click to expand...
What he said :)

Time Machine is a fantastic simple consumer backup system. The vast majority of people have no clue how to achieve a useful backup of all their photos and music, to have a system where they can just plug in a drive and agree to using it for Time Machine and be done with it is great.

Me, I prefer to have more control. I don't need multiple versions of files. All I want is a good solid backup. Nightly backups from one drive to another scheduled with SuperDuper (using SmartUpdate). Works a treat.
 
I was using Time Machine with a 500GB Seagate HDD in a Firewire 400 enclosure but over the holidays I bought a new Seagate 1.5TB HDD and put it in an Icy Dock MB559UEB-1S Firewire 800 enclosure. I moved my Time Machine over to the new drive.

The Icy Dock is an awesome device. It's quiet and fast with the Oxford 924DSB chipset. The silver version I got even matches the aluminum iMac perfectly. It almost looks like something Jonathan Ive might have designed. ;)
 
Thanks for the suggestions. I decided to go with a Firewire 800 small 2.5 inch WD 500 GB drive. I wanted a small drive, and this works perfectly.

Albeit, the drive is a little small. I'm waiting to get a bigger drive.
 
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