Time Machine or not?

[Howard Brazee]

I have a home LAN with a Linksys wireless router. My wife's computer is on the 2nd floor and mine is in the basement. I had it wired before I got the wireless (and the Macs), so I turned off Airport. My wife's year old iMac has 250G disk, and my new iMac has 500G.

I'm trying to decide whether it makes sense to buy a 1T Time Capsule, or for the same money buy Firewire drives. I think my wife would prefer not having a drive on her desk, but she'd give up speed. Having both of our backups on one drive in the basement is really not particularly secure. We back up documents to .mac.

I'd like to see some discussion to help me decide.

 

[cherry su]

Yea, get the 500GB model (it uses Seagate instead of Hitachi DESKstar). If speed matters, get some CAT6 cables for GigE speed (roughly 30MBps in real world). If you can't wire everything up, use wireless N (the old iMac is a Core 2 Duo yes?).

 

[kingtj]

Comments on using Time Machine

From what I've experienced and read, I'm convinced that Apple's "Time Machine" is really more of a "supplementary" backup tool. It's not so wise to rely on it as your *only* or even *primary* form of backup.

Basically, it succeeds where typical backup strategies fail. (It allows you to bring back a file you accidentally deleted or changed as recently as an hour or so ago, vs. being stuck with what was on a previous night's nightly backup or worse.)

On the flip-side, it encourages only relatively short-term storage of things. When the Time Machine drive fills up, you have to start discarding the oldest data on it to free up more space. (Apple doesn't really provide any automated mechanism to permanently archive the "overflow" from it onto permanent DVD backup or anything like that.)

It seems to me like the occasional, manual backup of important data to other media like DVDR or even CDR disc still needs to be part of your backup strategy. Let Time Machine give you a quick, easy way to try to recover anything you recently lost and needed back ... but don't consider it as "covering everything".

I have a home LAN with a Linksys wireless router. My wife's computer is on the 2nd floor and mine is in the basement. I had it wired before I got the wireless (and the Macs), so I turned off Airport. My wife's year old iMac has 250G disk, and my new iMac has 500G.

I'm trying to decide whether it makes sense to buy a 1T Time Capsule, or for the same money buy Firewire drives. I think my wife would prefer not having a drive on her desk, but she'd give up speed. Having both of our backups on one drive in the basement is really not particularly secure. We back up documents to .mac.

I'd like to see some discussion to help me decide.

 

[Howard Brazee]

Yea, get the 500GB model (it uses Seagate instead of Hitachi DESKstar). If speed matters, get some CAT6 cables for GigE speed (roughly 30MBps in real world). If you can't wire everything up, use wireless N (the old iMac is a Core 2 Duo yes?).

It is. So I could do some speed checks. With a cat-5 cable in place, stringing cat-6 shouldn't be as hard as it was when I failed to get the cat-5 in and had to pay somebody.

If I use the 500GB model, I won't be able to use it for an image backup as well, if I want to back up both of our computers. My wife doesn't want to think about backups. Once a month I restart her .mac backups and copy her parallels partition when she's busy doing something else. I'm still paying off my iMac and golf season is coming, so my allowance won't stretch to redundant backups. I've got about $500 to spend and no current backups for either machine.

 

[Batt]

I currently use Time Machine with a 300gb Seagate firewire drive. I'm going to buy a 500gb Time Capsule and give the Seagate to a daughter who currently has no backup. It is my sole backup system and has already saved my ass twice. I highly recommend it.

 

[Snips]

On the flip-side, it encourages only relatively short-term storage of things. When the Time Machine drive fills up, you have to start discarding the oldest data on it to free up more space. (Apple doesn't really provide any automated mechanism to permanently archive the "overflow" from it onto permanent DVD backup or anything like that.)

To clarify my own understanding: I believe Time Machine (in conjunction with Time Capsule) will always provide a back-up of the current disk content, so if you have a whole load of photos that haven't changed for many months, I believe they will always be backed up and available. The things that get thrown out would be very old versions of files that frequently change, so in that regard it's a back-up of current and recent history, but not a long term archiving tool.

Correct?


If so, I expect that would suit most people's needs in terms of back-up.

Also, has it been confirmed whether an external drive attached to a Time Capsule can be used for wireless back-up (i.e. to increase Time Capsule capacity).

Cheers,
Nige