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Time Capsule - is it really so unreliable?
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Thank you kindly for the insight.
Yes, 99% of what will be important to save "forever" will simply be baby photos/videos. Several years down the road I might delete them from the actual computer and just keep on hardrive/storage that is external, like when I'd upgrade computers. I'm basically deciding on which iMac to order anyday now.
Yes, 99% of what will be important to save "forever" will simply be baby photos/videos. Several years down the road I might delete them from the actual computer and just keep on hardrive/storage that is external, like when I'd upgrade computers. I'm basically deciding on which iMac to order anyday now.
You're misinterpreting him/her.
They're saying that they'll keep a copy of the photos on their computer, and another copy on an external hard drive.
As long as you keep two copies, you should be fine (one on your comp, one on external HD or time capsule). If one drive goes down, you always have the other.
It seems that the cause for TC failures is PS electonics - overheating and eventually dead capacitors. However on Wikipedia I read that this problem "might have been resolved" and few users report that theirs TC seems to run cooler. Now I dont know if I can trust Apple that he is really resolved the PSU issue (after all he claimed that HDD in TC is server grade but looks like it is standard desktop HDD - Hitachi Deskstar)?! If there is someone with the new 1 or 2TB TC what are the temps?
I don't own a Time Capsule but it does seem users have had a mixed experience. Much of this is may be to do with the fact that it's constantly trying to back up data, unless the user has set the device to back up only when told to. The constant wear and tear and heat is bound to have an effect over a period of time, therefore I don't particularly like this solution myself.
External hard drives are extremely cheap now, and you can buy a basic 1 terabyte drive for around £70. If you want quality and reliability, I suggest buying a luxury product like a G-Tech 2 TB external drive. http://www.g-technology.com/Products/g-drive.cfm. It has a fan-less cooling system, so less things to go wrong. It has 3GB eSata, USB2 and Firewire 800/400 so lots of options, but keep in mind that there are new developments around the corner in terms of connectivity i.e. USB3 and Lightpeak. For your needs however, you probably need little more than USB2, as higher speeds are mostly of use to video professionals. I have several G-Tech hard drives, and they are all excellent. They also resemble the Mac styling, so if this is important to you, then it's an obvious choice.
The next thing to consider is how are you going to creat a back-up. You either store your data on your laptop and your external drive as a back up, or you have 2x 2 TB external hard drives, one a copy of the other. Most of the time, the 2nd hard drive is unplugged and locked away, only used say once a month to catch up with new data. This will mean it is less exposed to wear and tear and should have good long life prospects. The other benefits of this system are that if you have an electrical spike and your 2nd hard drive is hidden away, your data is safe. A RAIDed drive on an unprotected electrical connection may get damaged. This happened to me last year, but I had my solution in place. The other risks to your data are either environmental or criminal, i.e. flood, fire or theft. If your 2nd drive is in a secure or simply a different location to the first, then much of these problems are avoided.
This solution may seem an over-complicated and difficult process to some, as some users want the simplicity of Time Capsule - the 'forget about it' approach. I work in professional video production and I also have a lot of personal data such as photographs that I don't want to lose. Losing my data would be more than an inconvenience. I find in practice, the 2 drive solution is easy as you don't have to be slavish about backing up, so long as you do it every 2-4 weeks you should be fine. To keep things simple, keep all your files on the external hard drive, and then every 4 weeks copy the new files to the 2nd drive - that's it.
If you need a software solution that will back up new files and delete no longer needed files to your 2nd hard drive, try SyncX, I find it works rather well http://www.qdea.com/pages/pages-syncx/syncx1.html. You can also look at these ThriftMac solutions: http://www.thriftmac.com/utilities/?c=backup
yup all true - well, from my experience. ours died at the 18month mark - dead capacitors of course!
i think that is currently a MUCH better option. the AEBS has an external PSU - no overheating!I see the average life time is 20 months, that is very short period (my old desktop drives works without a problem for 5 years now).
What do you think if I buy Airport Extreme and WD external disk with RAID 1 option. This could be a better option.
nah, doesnt matter if the HDD is being used or not, its whether its turned on or off.
dead caps yup thats what happened to ours and thousands of other people
they might have looked at the issue and resolved it with the new ones, hard to tell though i guess we will have to wait another 20 months
for anybody with a dead TC, the HDD can still be recovered and used to continue your backups! i made a small thread here, it briefly explains what i did to get it working. all my networked computers and share/backup to it aswell.
Mine failed after 21 months but I got it replaced without any difficulty at all via the Applecare cover on my iMac which I bought in August 2007.
I would buy another and would recommend them to others because they are just so nice to use and very power efficient. I used to use a Linux file server for my "always on" storage but the Time Capsule requires a fraction of the power and is virtually maintenance free. I only use it for backups in the true sense so I didn't lose any data when mine failed and it took moments to setup my new one which I got on January 2nd after a Genius appointment at my local store.
If you did decide to use the TC as a primary data storage device (as opposed to a backup device) and it failed then you can still remove the hard disk (quite easily) and connect to a SATA enclosure to recover your data. Of course you should never only have one copy of your critical data but you can very easily archive the data from your TC onto an external USB drive connected directly to the TC. You can also extend the TC using any number of external USB drives if you choose to if you are in any way nervous of using the internal disk.
All in all a very competent little device. Shame about the power supply issues but not the end of the world by any means. Recommended!
I would buy another and would recommend them to others because they are just so nice to use and very power efficient. I used to use a Linux file server for my "always on" storage but the Time Capsule requires a fraction of the power and is virtually maintenance free. I only use it for backups in the true sense so I didn't lose any data when mine failed and it took moments to setup my new one which I got on January 2nd after a Genius appointment at my local store.
If you did decide to use the TC as a primary data storage device (as opposed to a backup device) and it failed then you can still remove the hard disk (quite easily) and connect to a SATA enclosure to recover your data. Of course you should never only have one copy of your critical data but you can very easily archive the data from your TC onto an external USB drive connected directly to the TC. You can also extend the TC using any number of external USB drives if you choose to if you are in any way nervous of using the internal disk.
All in all a very competent little device. Shame about the power supply issues but not the end of the world by any means. Recommended!
I understand exactly what was said. You aren't getting my point, because when you pick and copy files manually (oh, I'll get around to copying it now and then), it's mostly like not doing it at all. The day you have catastrophic failure of the main hard drive is the day when you haven't gotten around to making copies in a while and you've lost something precious. That's a failed backup.
Make no mistake, selecting and copying files manually to a second drive is not a real backup strategy. There are plenty of people who learned that the hard way.
A lot of people have been making this assertion about the Time Capsule, and it's frankly ridiculous. You could say exactly the same thing about your computer - all that on-time and heat is bound to have an effect over time, right? Better not use it!
The fact is that hard drives and electronics when designed properly, have an incredibly long lifespan - even when used 24/7. In fact, there are arguments to be made going the other way - that leaving an electronic device on 24/7 is better for it than shutting it down every so often. Either way, unless you are looking to store it unchanged forever (in which case, you'd better print it out, as there are not currently any accessible methods of permanent digital data storage short of manually moving it from one medium to another over time), it's all moot. I'd say that 99% of the drives in my workplace last over 10 years. Of the remaining 1%, half of those probably fail in the first 6 months.
There may be a problem with a fraction of the Time Capsule's sold, but it sounds like Apple has been more than fair in replacing them, and if you are using the TC as a backup device, it doesn't matter if it fails at some point - you replace it and start backing up to it again. The benefits of having an automated hourly backup that people don't have to think about far outweighs any slight inconvenience that may occur. Slight, indeed, compared with manually changing and rotating drives every day.
That's a perfectly reasonable, if a rather labor intensive backup strategy. I'd rather see someone have an automated on-site backup paired with an automated off-site backup, because even if you have a 2nd off-line copy, it's worthless in case of fire, disaster, theft, etc. unless you take the additional manual step of manually rotating a copy off-site. This has gotten far more accessible in the last year or so as the price of cloud backup has tumbled.
Off site backup
Scooterguitar asked (post no.16 I think) about backing up baby photos. I have an iMac (primary storage) and an external HD drive (backup in case of mechanical failure). However I thought about what I would really not like to lose, and the photo archive is one of those things. Given that hard disks are so cheap, I used an older spare one to make an extra copy of only photos, and left that at my work office. Then in the event of a theft or fire, I'll still have that data from the hard disk left in my office. I'll update that every six month or so, so in the event I won't have lost anything historical.
This seemed to be a practical way of doing off-site storage as I can't see my using an internet service to backup 100Gb of photos!
Scooterguitar asked (post no.16 I think) about backing up baby photos. I have an iMac (primary storage) and an external HD drive (backup in case of mechanical failure). However I thought about what I would really not like to lose, and the photo archive is one of those things. Given that hard disks are so cheap, I used an older spare one to make an extra copy of only photos, and left that at my work office. Then in the event of a theft or fire, I'll still have that data from the hard disk left in my office. I'll update that every six month or so, so in the event I won't have lost anything historical.
This seemed to be a practical way of doing off-site storage as I can't see my using an internet service to backup 100Gb of photos!
I've had heat-related issues with a laptop - the 'BGA' (ball grid array) graphics memory slowly developed cracks in the soldering and the GPU failed due to excessive heat. As it was soldered to the motherboard, it was a bit of a write-off due to it being 3 years old.
First of all... I will guarantee you that as your baby gets older... the future pictures will become even more valuable and more interesting than the baby pictures. There is no way that you will believe that now... but it will happen. My point is that you do need a long term plan to save your pictures. This is not just for a "new baby".
You need a good backup solution. Luckily it is not expensive. I think that a good solution has a few required attributes:
1 - It is totally automatic. Any system that requires manual intervention (like taking a disk offsite) will fail
2 - It MUST include an off-site storage. If your house is burgularized, burns, hit by a tornado, earthquake, flood... then you lose everthing no matter how many backups you have in the house.
3 - On-site backups are extremely convenient for a recovery when a hard drives fails. Eventually, you will have a failure.
4 - Get rid of the notion that you will eventually archive your data. As you buy new computers, your available disk space will likely grow faster than your data. Keep everything on your main computer if at all practical. Sometimes it is not practical (ex: you are a professional photographer, or video producer) but for most home users.... your "critical" data will generally fit on a single computer... and it simplifies things (simple is good).
5 - My recommendation is to implement two totally separate, and fully automated backup solutions... one off-site, and one onsite.
2 - It MUST include an off-site storage. If your house is burgularized, burns, hit by a tornado, earthquake, flood... then you lose everthing no matter how many backups you have in the house.
3 - On-site backups are extremely convenient for a recovery when a hard drives fails. Eventually, you will have a failure.
4 - Get rid of the notion that you will eventually archive your data. As you buy new computers, your available disk space will likely grow faster than your data. Keep everything on your main computer if at all practical. Sometimes it is not practical (ex: you are a professional photographer, or video producer) but for most home users.... your "critical" data will generally fit on a single computer... and it simplifies things (simple is good).
5 - My recommendation is to implement two totally separate, and fully automated backup solutions... one off-site, and one onsite.
For offsite backup, I have traditionally used Mozy.com... but I am now evaluating CrashPlan. Both are "cloud based" and extremely secure -- Mozy and CrashPlan both use, or offer, 448b blowfish encryption. I would not use the 128b encryption products that are less secure over the long term. Prices for both are incredibly inexpensive. They run under $5/month for unlimited data storage. The initial backup is very slow, but once everything is initially uploaded, then it is very fast. The biggest reason I am moving to CrashPlan is because they offer true versioning.
For onsite backup, I am using Time Machine on all of our Macs, backed up to a Time Capsule.
Both of the above are fully automatic, I do not have to do anything on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. It just plain works.
Now how would I recover from a data failure?
- If a hard drive crashes on my computer... I would do a local restore from the Time Capsule without needing to reload each application.
- If I find a corrupted file... I can recover versions from either the Time Machine, or from CrashPlan.
- If my house is burglarized, burns down, or struck by natural disaster, then I buy a new computer, reload applications, and then restore all of my files from the cloud.
- If my Time Capsule fails... I buy a new one and within a few hours I am back to having two separate and independent backups running again.
- If the online backup service goes out of business... then I switch providers. In the mean time, I still have a local backup solution. I would probably then backup to a cheapo USB drive and manually move it offsite to give me temporary offsite backup until I was done uploading to my new cloud backup company.
- If I find a corrupted file... I can recover versions from either the Time Machine, or from CrashPlan.
- If my house is burglarized, burns down, or struck by natural disaster, then I buy a new computer, reload applications, and then restore all of my files from the cloud.
- If my Time Capsule fails... I buy a new one and within a few hours I am back to having two separate and independent backups running again.
- If the online backup service goes out of business... then I switch providers. In the mean time, I still have a local backup solution. I would probably then backup to a cheapo USB drive and manually move it offsite to give me temporary offsite backup until I was done uploading to my new cloud backup company.
Some other tips:
- Form the discipline to keep the "original copies" of all your irreplaceable data on one computer. Keeping different things in different places is usually a recipie for disaster. This single computer is the one that needs to be backed up to two places as I outlined above.
- It is fine to have other copies of data on other computers. For example... we often keep a full copy of our family pictures on our MacBooks. However... we always know that the "original copy" is on the iMac back at home. If we lose the laptop (or it is stolen from our hotel room)... we know the originals are still safe back home.
- If you are using a laptop as well as a home computer (as I recommend)... then using a file synchronization program like Dropbox or Mobile Me is extremely convenient. For the most part, we keep all of our "documents" on such sync programs (we use both Mobile Me and Dropbox). If we are traveling, then we always have local copies of our documents on on laptops. Also, equally importantly, if we create some original content while we are traveling... then it is instantly syncronized back to our home computer... which is being automatically backed up twice.
With this methodology... we really do no "need" to keep our MacBooks backed up... because all data is either a copy (the originals are back home on the iMac)... or they are synchronized with Dropbox/Mobile Me. Having said that... we do still do back them up to the Time Capsule... because if a HDD crashes on our laptop... it is just so convenient to use Time Machine to restore to the new hard drive.
- It is fine to have other copies of data on other computers. For example... we often keep a full copy of our family pictures on our MacBooks. However... we always know that the "original copy" is on the iMac back at home. If we lose the laptop (or it is stolen from our hotel room)... we know the originals are still safe back home.
- If you are using a laptop as well as a home computer (as I recommend)... then using a file synchronization program like Dropbox or Mobile Me is extremely convenient. For the most part, we keep all of our "documents" on such sync programs (we use both Mobile Me and Dropbox). If we are traveling, then we always have local copies of our documents on on laptops. Also, equally importantly, if we create some original content while we are traveling... then it is instantly syncronized back to our home computer... which is being automatically backed up twice.
With this methodology... we really do no "need" to keep our MacBooks backed up... because all data is either a copy (the originals are back home on the iMac)... or they are synchronized with Dropbox/Mobile Me. Having said that... we do still do back them up to the Time Capsule... because if a HDD crashes on our laptop... it is just so convenient to use Time Machine to restore to the new hard drive.
I think this advise is generally sound... and one that has worked for me. No system is perfect... but I think this one is good. Unless CrashPlan & Mozy both go out of business, and my house also burns down all on the same day... I will probably keep all of my critical data.
I Hope this helps you make a decision.
/Jim
The point was not that it 'doesn't' happen, it's that the fact that an otherwise extremely cost-effective, convenient backup system should be written off because it 'might' fail. Your failure sounds an awful lot like what happens with the otherwise excellent Thinkpad T43. We have a couple of those here at work - but we aren't putting them away on a shelf because that problem 'might' crop up somewhere down the road.
I agree users should purchase the Time Capsule if it is right for their requirements, so long as it isn't the only place the data is held. I also see cloud storage as a viable solution though it has costs of course. Unfortunately, my line of work isn't 'cloud' friendly right now as continuous, new high def video footage makes the upload impractical.
Time Capsule died from heatstroke after 20 months.
My 500Gb device died from apparently overheating after 20 months, out of warranty but Apple are replacing it, known issue after checking the serial number.
Prior to that worked well, noise level was very low. No worries, just bought a raid 1 mirrored external drive as well, can't be too careful......
My 500Gb device died from apparently overheating after 20 months, out of warranty but Apple are replacing it, known issue after checking the serial number.
Prior to that worked well, noise level was very low. No worries, just bought a raid 1 mirrored external drive as well, can't be too careful......
tbh im not sure why somebody wouldnt want a TC (talking general consumers here). imo everybody should have one! easy, efficient, and all that stuff.
over here in australia, the cloud doesnt exist - it does, but its not plausible at all. we have a 25gb cap per month, that is considered "a lot" of downloads, so backing up a ~200gb computer to the cloud is NEVER going to happen.
I got my 2 TB TC warranty replacement today. It's looks brand new, not a refurb (the top is pristine, no hairline scratches or anything). I'm currently restoring my backup sparsebundle images so I can pick up where I left off for two MBP backups.
+1
Is it really any worse than comparable devices? Sure there is a vocal community of people with failed devices, but that doesn't mean non-Apple NAS devices fare any better.
I think Apple products in general aren't any more or less reliable than anything else, at least not in my experience using them since 1986. Well, Dell laptops are worse but that's an extreme.
yup totally agree there. no matter what product is brought out, you will always have the defects - a large majority of those people will complain like there is no tomorrow. we all know the story.
WRT to the TC, there is a lot more speculation and concerned people because the failure "rate" would seem to be quite a significant amount higher, which is understandable given the downright pathetic thermal care taken by apple in designing this product.
needless to say that the dead TCs are easily fixed.. replace three capacitors and its good to go again! apple wont replace these caps though, they cant get replacement PSUs for them (which is bullsh*t tbh).
/rant
the supposed fix was using a hard drive that used less energy. the design of the newer time capsules are pretty much the same as the older ones
don't know the defect rate but there sure are a lot of them
http://timecapsuledead.org/
Sorry I meant death rate, not defect rate. They are rarely defective units (unless they come with Seagate drives, lol), in fact the power supplies are apparently very well built.
I just keep hearing about them dying. And no, saying that everyone's NAS craps out after 16 months? I don't think so. Just no.
That's ridiculous.
There's no way to be an apologist over this one guys. Those are $300+ devices!
I just keep hearing about them dying. And no, saying that everyone's NAS craps out after 16 months? I don't think so. Just no.
That's ridiculous.
There's no way to be an apologist over this one guys. Those are $300+ devices!