Well I'm concerned with TC. I've read a lot of problems with them burning out in 1 to 3 years. They also seem like they'd get hot. Anyway, isn't TC basically a NAS type system anyway? I also need more than 3 TB, or I will soon.
Can you add a drive plugged into it as another backup?
Any of these devices can fail. I do not know the actual volumes, but I would suspect that TC's sell at least 100:1 compared to home NAS boxes. I am probably under calling that by another order of magnitude or two. The gen 1 TC's had some premature failures... I'd suspect in the low single digits of percent... failing at about 18 months due to fried power supplies. The newer units have not seemed to demonstrate this. If you read other threads in this "Mac Peripherals" section... you will see posts of people having problems with NAS and Time Machine. This is probably a larger problem then even the first Gen1 TCs.
I would use the TC only for backup. It is bulletproof simple and it works. Either the 2TB or 3TB model would back up both of your laptops.
You can add a USB drive to the TC, and use it as shared storage between your two computers. However, I would not recommend this because
it has the exact same problem that your NAS box would have... it is not part of the backup set of either computer. The bold section is key! I personally think that it is useless to have data on a drive that is not part of a backup set of your computers. Any such data is a disaster waiting to happen.
If you data set grows beyond what you fit on your two laptops, then you have a few options:
- Add sufficient storage to your laptops via HDD upgrades. This is the cleanest option. All your data would be internal to your computers, and would back-up automatically.
- Add a USB drive directly to your laptop. It is clunky... but you would only need it when you needed the additional data. For example... if you have a large movie collection... then you could keep the movies on the USB drive and only connect it at movie time. The data would back-up whenever the USB drive is connected.
- Buy a Mac Mini or Mac Mini Server, and use that as your depository for your large volume of data. This will allow you to run backup of that data to a TC and to the cloud.
I have owned many NAS servers. They are great for geeks. They are great for small businesses that have a small IT department (or IT guy). They are not so great for consumers... unless they have massive data needs... and even then they come with their own problems. RAID gives the appearance of adding significant data protection, and while it helps if you have individual drive failures... it adds its own set of problems and instability.
At this point, I cannot imagine ever wanting another NAS. However, if I did, I will not use any of the ones I already own (I own 4, and they are all powered off). Instead, I'll buy a Mac Mini Server, I will direct attach enough drives to meet my needs (probably with Thunderbolt)... and share the data on my home network. As a server... it can run Time Machine to another drive... and it can run cloud backup software.
/Jim
