Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Has Time Capsule saved anyone? User stories, please.

It works great!

Well this post is rather tangential isn't it?

To your post specifically, the time capsule/time machine solution has saved my hide many times over. We use one at home for 5 computers, and a 2TB one at my office supporting 10 machines - and it saves us constantly. When we have a dead machine occur at the office (rarely), we throw a loaner macbook or iMac at the problem, and within about an hour - we have a new machine basically up and running in about 2 hours (or less).

We backup three MacBooks via wireless (don't try the back up that way the first time though - takes a zillion hours or so), and have recovered lots of stuff all the time with user error related deletes.

Lastly, and this may not apply to you - but we use Outlook 2011, and it gets corrupted all the time, and we have to go back to the time capsule often to grab the last backup of that file store - to get back up and running. Personally, I think it's a great option for brainless backups - and we make copies of the time capsule every so often with a USB drive.

TMS

P.S. On one other similarly related thread, at home we also use the time capsule as a media server store - pushing out our iTunes through a local machine - and all the media is stored on the capsule. Works great... been using it for over 3 years like this (although recently it's getting a little bit network flaky (as mentioned in a previous post somewhere here) but still seems to work great), and we back that up every so often too!

TMS
 
+1 For time Capsule.
I personally went the Airport Extreme + External Hard drive but either is a great choice.
(I decided to go the external route because when I got the extreme i had no intentions of getting a mac and I wanted a hard drive for my air.)
 
It sounds like I cannot use the Airport Extreme plus a separate external USB hard drive for Time Machine backups. Is that correct? If I cold then I would do that and get a bigger USB drive.

-- Boris
 
aComicBookFan said:
It sounds like I cannot use the Airport Extreme plus a separate external USB hard drive for Time Machine backups. Is that correct? If I cold then I would do that and get a bigger USB drive.

-- Boris
Click to expand...

In what way does it sound like you cannot do it after having had people telling you it's doable? ;) I'm using an external USB hard drive connected to my Airport Extreme for TM backups - no hickups.
 
I read somewhere on here that the first Extreme units did unofficially support Time Machine backups but then Apple disabled it in later updates. The reasoning is that Apple wanted people to buy Time Capsules rather than making a home brew solution so to speak. One setup canabalized the sales of the other.

-- Boris
 
aComicBookFan said:
I read somewhere on here that the first Extreme units did unofficially support Time Machine backups but then Apple disabled it in later updates. The reasoning is that Apple wanted people to buy Time Capsules rather than making a home brew solution so to speak. One setup canabalized the sales of the other.

-- Boris
Click to expand...

That would be my post, but I advise you to re-read it since you seem to have misinterpreted just about everything ;)
 
I am currently using the previous generation of the Airport Extreme Base Station with a WD MyBook 250 GB USB drive flawlessly with time machine automatically backing up every hour just as if it was connected directly to my Macbook Pro.

So yes, the Airport Extreme Base Station + USB External Drive = Time Capsule alternative is true.

This is with a 2006 Macbook Pro 1.1 running OS X 10.6.8
 
I see it now! Thanks for the clarification. I can get lost in data pretty easily. :)

-=- Boris
 
Arcsylver said:
I am currently using the previous generation of the Airport Extreme Base Station with a WD MyBook 250 GB USB drive flawlessly with time machine automatically backing up every hour just as if it was connected directly to my Macbook Pro.

So yes, the Airport Extreme Base Station + USB External Drive = Time Capsule alternative is true.

This is with a 2006 Macbook Pro 1.1 running OS X 10.6.8
Click to expand...

Same here. Using a Seagate GoFlex Home 1TB without any issues. Works great.
 
well worth it.
helps with the occasional inadvertent deletion of a file or pic.


also recommended by genius bar as best way to move to a newer machine
 
Been saved, Yes.

Came out one day and my 8 month old iMac was dead. Completely non responsive except for the gray screen. My HDD had died. I went to BestBuy and bought a Firewire drive, plugged in my backup drive which was attached to my Airport Extreme (a makeshift TC) and within 10 minutes, it was restoring my backup. Took it about 7 hours to copy everything over, but it was as if I was back on my old HDD.

About a week later I took my iMac to the Apple Store and had the drive replaced, got it home and restored it from my Firewire drive. Never had a Windows drive crash be this easy to fix.

I now have a new TC (4th Gen) and it backs up every hour.
 
Nope, mine waited until I needed it and then died!

I bought my TC in March 2010, found it very easy to set up and, although it would sometimes need to be inexplicably rebooted I was happy it was working ok. Then I made a huge mistake. Having never needed to restore anything on our Macs, I allowed my son to wipe his disk on his Mac with the reassurance that everything would be restored from the TC. Ho, ho, ho. How I laughed when I found that the mysterious noise I could hear in my lounge was coming from the TC and that the hard-drive could not be accessed. So the first time I needed the blessed thing, it failed.

I spent £90 on a new drive so that the Genius Bar could get the data off the TC but that did not work. I pointed out that although it was out of warranty that surely it should be "fit for purpose". Apparently not! They offered me a new one for £238 but I think I'll use the money for Cloud storage or find another solution but it won't replace all my son's photos or his music.
 
MaDexter said:
I bought my TC in March 2010, found it very easy to set up and, although it would sometimes need to be inexplicably rebooted I was happy it was working ok. Then I made a huge mistake. Having never needed to restore anything on our Macs, I allowed my son to wipe his disk on his Mac with the reassurance that everything would be restored from the TC. Ho, ho, ho. How I laughed when I found that the mysterious noise I could hear in my lounge was coming from the TC and that the hard-drive could not be accessed. So the first time I needed the blessed thing, it failed.

I spent £90 on a new drive so that the Genius Bar could get the data off the TC but that did not work. I pointed out that although it was out of warranty that surely it should be "fit for purpose". Apparently not! They offered me a new one for £238 but I think I'll use the money for Cloud storage or find another solution but it won't replace all my son's photos or his music.
Click to expand...

Time Machine does backups once an hour, you mean the hard drive failed during the hour since the last backup?
 
I have two TC's that have been running for years.

TC#1 is dedicated to backing up an iMac that's primarily a home media server. It's one of the original 500GB TCs that I hacked and upgraded to 2TB internally some years ago. Runs flawlessly. I've never had to restore the whole iMac, but I do go in occasionally and retrieve files I may have deleted months ago.

TC#2 backs up three macbooks wirelessly. They belong to my wife and kids who'd likely never back up if left to do it themselves. That TC has allowed me to migrate them to several new MacBooks easily over the years. It's also got me through a couple of complete hard drive failures and a planned upgrade of an HDD to SSD. Recovery couldn't have been easier.

Both TCs are hidden away in the house. So if anyone steals the Macs we won't lose any data. More peace of mind.

Bottom Line: If either of my TCs died, I'd buy another. I like an easy life. :)


BTW, I experimented with Airport Extremes early on. They're a bit cheaper (although not by so much nowadays). Their external USB hard drives never seemed to stay reliably connected and hourly backups often failed. Quite annoying. That was years ago, however, so things might have changed.
 
The TCs we had only cost me time. We had 3 different ones (bought one and got 2 replacements until taking them back). All were hot. All crashed.
I'd love them if they worked. But due to the crashing and the heat (too hot to touch) I saw them more as a threat than as an asset.

I'd consider how much data is being pushed to the TC. If you use it a lot, it's quite simple. It doesn't have a fan (that is connected to the outside). So if the "server grade disk" has to be on constantly, it gets too hot.
 
+1 for TC

had a kernal panic on a macbook

thanks to the TC i was able to do a restore on an iMac and volia

my only problem is now that i have two user accounts but that is my fault for not setting it up direct from TC in the first place
 
Do the newest versions of the TC still run hot? Any issues with the newest version? I am considering the 2TB or 3 TB version after my HD failed last week. Thanks
 
Not a lot of success stories, so I figured I would add my own.

I have been using the same Time Capsule with my iMac since 2008 or so. Long story short, the hard drive in my iMac failed and my system wouldn't boot. I used the Snow Leopard install disc to boot my iMac, told it I wanted to restore from a Time Machine backup, and restored my system to an external FireWire drive. I've been running the system off the same FireWire drive for three or four months and the Time Capsule continues to backup hour after hour.

I was impressed by the restore because it was exactly as I had left my system. I did have to re-enter the license for Office I think).

Also, after three years or more of backups, my Time Capsule got full and was taking a lot of time to backup. Eventually, for reasons unknown to me, it decided to just start over, clearing itself and starting to backup anew. This got rid of years of incremental backups, but it worked fine when I needed it.

I will probably buy a newer, larger one in the future to use a/b/g on a separate channel from n. This is the only router I have and it works fine through my home and with the devices I have (Roku, Wii, iPad/iPhone, etc.).
 
I don't have a time capsule since I have an airport and multiple external and internal drives attached to my machine but I do use Time Machine and yes, it has saved me multiple times.

I'm usually super careful with my data but three times I've deleted something I thought I no longer needed, only to need it again, this is where Time Machine comes in to play. I simply open it, go back to where the file was, and restore it. Super simple.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back