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Why Time Capsule vs Airport Extreme + HD?

D

Dr Strangelove

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 24, 2008
205
0
So I am wondering why one would buy a 1TB Time capsule and pay so much more for a 1TB HD internal?

I am in the market and looking at pricing. Seems like the Airport Extreme plus USB 1TB is way cheaper than getting the Time Capsule....

Thoughts?
 
All in one design makes it look less cluttered.

For example, if you wanted to connect a printer you can have either:

1) Time Capsule + Printer

2) Extreme + USB Hub + Printer + External Drive
 
You're right that the AEBS plus USB external HD is the cheaper option. However, officially Apple does not support Time Machine over AEBS and the USB-connected drive. While it works, some users have had varied success.

Think about it: Time Machine plus a all-in-one router/wireless back-up option is a perfect combination. Simple, clean, effective. It just works. Time Capsule is for those users who either normally won't consider a external HD, or for those who don't know/can't be bothered with playing around with extra connections. There are a lot of people in both of those camps. Apple's arrived at a great solution, and is no doubt making good money from it.
 
I am not discrediting the marketing or ease of use aspect. I was referring to myself not really having a clutter limitation. So it does work then to use an Extreme plus HD but is not supported?
 
I'd rather have airport extreme (i do have it) because if one thing fails you can always replace it. And it's cheaper. Plus if you decide to take your hard drive anywhere you can.
 
I love my Time Capsule. It didn't cost that much more if i went with the AEBS and external HD combo. I think I would of saved $40 overall. I also have an portable external HD connected to my TC when I need to take a HD somewhere. Plus if you get Applecare with your Mac the TC is connected to the extended warranty free of charge.

I can easily understand why someone wouldn't want the TC, but for me it was the best solution.
 
yeah, I dunno, as long as the backups still work with the Airport Extreme, I cant justify the price. The time capsule is $300 more than the Extreme. I can buy almost 3TB worth of hard drives for that price.
 
Can anyone verify for me that I will be able to backup as usually using AE + my own external drive?
 
I bought a TC early on and had problems with it (freezes, resets, disconnects, etc.), so I returned it and got an AEBS a few months later. It works very well for me for TM backups from 2 Macs. The part about it being unsupported for TM backups is guesswork; nobody knows for sure what the official Apple stance is because different users get different answers, and b/c Apple hasn't come out with an "official" statement about it AFAIK. But if it is not supported, why did they add it back in with 7.3.0 firmware? If the AEBS support was a mistake in 7.3.0 they have certainly had time enough to remove that feature in newer revisions, but they have not done so.
 
Thanks guys, that is the information I was looking for. Will be picking up the extreme as soon as the new MBP comes out. I mean I love Apple and all but $300 for 1TB of storage is insane.
 
The 1TB is really over priced, but the 500GB isn't that bad. I bought a 500GB TC and if/when I need more space I will either upgrade the drive or add an external HD. It makes life easier for the time being and has one less thing plugged into the UPS. Yes it's a little more expensive to have the 500GB integrated HD, but it is not unreasonable. I consider the 1 TB to be unreasonable apple pricing, but buying the biggest anything from apple has a large premium.
 
jampat said:
The 1TB is really over priced, but the 500GB isn't that bad. I bought a 500GB TC and if/when I need more space I will either upgrade the drive or add an external HD. It makes life easier for the time being and has one less thing plugged into the UPS. Yes it's a little more expensive to have the 500GB integrated HD, but it is not unreasonable. I consider the 1 TB to be unreasonable apple pricing, but buying the biggest anything from apple has a large premium.
Click to expand...
I like the idea of everything in one box, but since the internal disk cannot span to an external disk, your options are limited. With an AEBS+HD at elast I can replace the disk easily with a larger one if and when needed.
 
I don't get the Time Capsule. Sure, there is less clutter and it's a cool concept, but you pay a premium for the technology. I thought about doing the Airport backup with Time Machine, then decided it wasn't worth the effort. Why plug a hard drive into Airport when you can just as easily plug it into a port on your computer? I would rather send my backups to an internal drive, or to an external via firewire than to send the backups wirelessly and clogging the network. It seems to be an inefficient method of backing up but I might be missing something. The only good thing I can think of is if you wanted to setup a file storage area that all computers could access. This way, if you had friends over, they could access files you have stored on the Airport drive and it would act as a server. Then again, I can do that with file sharing on my computer.

Finally, if you do opt to run backups via Airport, wouldn't it make better sense to have the drives external so you could disconnect and take them with you, add to them, or be able to swap out the drive if needed?
 
Wireless is handy for a laptop. It backs it up no matter where I am and makes sure I can't forget to have a recent copy. Not that much changes day to day normally so it works fine. When I am changing more (ie. backing up aperture vault), I connect the network cable. Yes direct connect external HD would be faster, but much less convenient for regular backups for me.
 
Wireless works great for backing up my wife's computer too. I used to do manual backups when I remembered by turning on the external hard disk and running TM or SD!. Now it just backs up automatically over the network with no intervention by me. While it is true that a full restore will not be as easy as it would have been, the convenience and automated features make up for this (in my case at least).
 
Dr Strangelove said:
Can anyone verify for me that I will be able to backup as usually using AE + my own external drive?
Click to expand...

My extreme works with a seagate freeagent pro attached as a time machine drive. Backups are pretty slow (especially if there's a "g" device using the network!), but I guess that's true with the TC also (my mom has one).

If I actually lost all my data and had to restore from my network backup I think I'd be down for about a day while it restored! :p
 
QCassidy352 said:
My extreme works with a seagate freeagent pro attached as a time machine drive. Backups are pretty slow (especially if there's a "g" device using the network!), but I guess that's true with the TC also (my mom has one).

If I actually lost all my data and had to restore from my network backup I think I'd be down for about a day while it restored! :p
Click to expand...
That's why I also do SuperDuper! clones, either to a local drive or to a network drive. The network solution will require more time to restore (I have to first restore the image to local drive), but the local clone is fast to restore. Use the correct backup method for the situation: SuperDuper! clones for complete disaster recovery, Time Machine for file-level recovery in case you delete a file or files.
 
danny_w said:
That's why I also do SuperDuper! clones, either to a local drive or to a network drive. The network solution will require more time to restore (I have to first restore the image to local drive), but the local clone is fast to restore. Use the correct backup method for the situation: SuperDuper! clones for complete disaster recovery, Time Machine for file-level recovery in case you delete a file or files.
Click to expand...

eh, I know you're right, but it's too much trouble to buy a second drive. If disaster truly strikes, I can wait out the recovery.
 
QCassidy352 said:
eh, I know you're right, but it's too much trouble to buy a second drive. If disaster truly strikes, I can wait out the recovery.
Click to expand...
You can use SuperDuper! to create a sparse image backup on your network drive (TC for example). Then if disaster strikes you can always run SD! to restore this to a real drive; if you have another Mac, you can setup the one that needs restoring into target disk mode and use SD! from the other Mac to restore the image in the sparse bundle backup directly to the target mode drive. I don't know how long this would take, but I would certainly think that it would be faster than using TM.

EDIT: This is what I do for my wife's computer, whihc backs up to the AEBS+HD wirelessly. If I ever need to restore I will hook it up in target disk mode to my Macbook and do the restore directly.
 
I will buy a 1TB TC when the price drops, but not until then. Apple... are you reading this?
 
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