I am new to the apple worls and i have some questions:

[gathart]

I am new to all of this, so if I seem to ask ridiculous questions, it is just my ignorance.
(1) what is a bridge mode
(2) can you use an airport extreme in one part of your house and use a TC both as your main backup and as some kind of a ''jumping point'' in another part of your house.
(3) Is timecapsule a good idea or not - get from the reviews a mixed picture - some say it is great others its useless and breaking down too often.
(4) can you have more then one backup system?

I really apreciate your help, thankk you.

Gerard

 

[miles01110]

4 ) Yes. You can buy SuperDuper or use Carbon Copy Cloner to make bootable backups, use Time Machine without a Time Capsule on an external hard drive of your choice, or manually back up your data with drag and drop.

 

[gathart]

4 ) Yes. You can buy SuperDuper or use Carbon Copy Cloner to make bootable backups, use Time Machine without a Time Capsule on an external hard drive of your choice, or manually back up your data with drag and drop.

Can you have two time machines on seperate external hard drives?? (just as an extra backup??)

 

[dXTC]

(1) Bridge mode refers to using a router or switch as a "network bridge", which connects the nodes (i.e. computers) directly attached to it to another router or switch. You can activate bridge mode to bring two disparate wired or wireless networks together. One serves as the master, assigning internal IP addresses to all nodes and providing access to the outside world/Internet; the other acts as a "range extender" of sorts.

(2) Yes. Many people would have the Time Capsule as the main router, but your configuration may prove useful, especially if your Mac is wired via Ethernet cable to the Time Capsule (for fast backups), which is set to "bridge mode" to the Airport Extreme. The Extreme would have its DHCP server switched on; it would be assigning IP addresses to all computers in your network, including the computer attached to the Time Capsule. The Extreme would also have your Internet modem attached to it.

(3) Yes. It definitely doesn't hurt.

(4) Like miles01110 said, you can use third-party software for extra backups. Also, you can use a NAS (network-attached storage) solution with RAID mirroring if you want really high reliability.

(4b) No, I don't think Time Machine allows two different saving destinations. You'll have to use a RAID solution as mentioned above to get "double copies".

 

[Tomorrow]

(4) can you have more then one backup system?

Unless your data is super-critical (like you're maintaining customer information or something) I usually discourage people from maintaining two backups, simply because the risk of losing both your main hard drive or storage AND your backup at the same time is pretty low.

Normally if your backup fails for whatever reason you just create a new one from your computer.

The only real downsides of course are the cost of buying two drives and the space they'll take up.