Into my Time Capsule and away

Today, I travelled through the space time continuum, and lo, I found all my files, and behold, I was a man who was happy.

That's because I bought a one terrabyte Time Capsule. It's awesome - it just sits there and wirelessly backs up all three Macs in my house. It's just a little, flat white box, like a Mac mini or an Apple TV.

As long as it can get power and it has some airflow around it (don't keep it in the hot water cupboard covered in wooly blankets ), I can conceal it in the hopes any nefarious bandit who may rob me doesn't find that. Then I can get a replacement Mac, back up all my files to a it and carry on regardless.

The first backup, which backed up the entire contents of my MacBook Pro's hard drive, took about four hours. I plugged in an ethernet cable to do this, as it's faster than wireless naturally. (I've heard of people with much bigger hard drive contents than mine taking three days to do that first backup, but that was over wireless.)

Then I grabbed my academic partner's iMac, put it in my office and did the same (plugged it in directly with an ethernet cable). Her work - and especially her own digital art - is priceless. Now it's safe. Then I connected my Uni student daughter's MacBook.
From then on, every Mac in the house has been backing up any changes regularly.

I excluded the Applications folders and another external hard drive - if anything goes wrong I'd rather reinstall applications anyway - but everything else is covered. The beauty of it is, I don't need to think about backups or remember anything. As long as I'm inside my secure network, backups take place every hour.

Every tech-minded person knows the importance of backing up. I have used various schemes over the years. The worst one, back in the day, was the JCE system: Just Copy Everything, first to floppies, then Jazz and Zip drives, then DVDs, then tape ... eventually backups got automated. Thanks goodness.

Some systems were better than others. Up to a year ago I used two methods - Apple's free Backup software which regularly backed up to an EziQuest external hard drive and my iDisk, plus MobileMe, which synched my Address Book, email accounts, Mail rules (filters) signatures and Smart Mailboxes, widgets, Dock items, preferences, notes, Entourage notes (if I used that) and even my secure keychains to a secure server managed by Apple.

When I got an iPhone, this service was extended to that, keeping it in sync with my Macs. Backup was good because it gave you lots of control over what, and what wasn't, backed up and when it happened.

But in Leopard, Time Machine was included. Time Machine takes all the work out of backing up, as long as you have an external drive connected. It does the first backup (fairly fast over FireWire or USB2) then checks every hour to see if anything's changed. These subsequent backups are fast and don't lag systems, noticeably. The more techy types don't like it much as they prefer more control over what, when and where. But for many users, Time Machine is nothing short of a godsend.

Time Capsule just added to this functionality, being wireless. Once you've got past your initial big backup, it's literally 'fuggedaboudit'. (Although my advice is, don't - it pays to check your Time Machine pane in System Preferences every now and again to make sue it's still working, as disconnections can trip the system.)

If you want your data back, that's when you go into the Space Time Continuum. Well, not really. It just looks like that. Your whole screen slides down to be replaced by a universe, complete with moving stars (warp 9 ...) showing you a view through time, as it were, with your backups going back. Click the one you want, press Restore at bottom right and the file is copied back to your Mac in its original location.

Oh, I forgot to say - this Time Capsule is one of the new breed. It has dual-band wireless, so it has created a fast 50m wireless network in and around my house that all the Macs are using to connect to the internet via my Orcon broadband router. Oh, plus my iPhone and an iPod touch. It's an AirPort Extreme 802.11n base station with a big hard drive in it. Being dual band, it handles older devices on the 2.4GHz band while newer devices can use the 5GHz band at the same time.

Another feature I really like is Guest Network. When someone comes around - a visitor with a Mac or PC laptop, or an iPhone or iPod touch - and wants access to the 'net, mostly I feel fine about giving them the login and password, but you may feel a lot better about granting Guest Access. It has a different password to your usual network. That, including your printer, attached drives or other devices, remains secure.

And yes, I paid a premium. If I was more techy (actually, if I could be bothered - and I really can't, anymore), I could get a 1 Terrabyte external hard drive for about $500 - it's around $480 RRP for an EZQuest Phoenix 1000Gb eSATA II/USB2 (from the MacSense price list). An EZQuest Thunder Pro (FW400/800/USB2) is more of a pro drive, but that's $825.

Add an AirPort Extreme base station to the cheaper example for $379 and I get a total of just $859. But that only backs up the one Mac the drive is plugged into, plus there's a cable, limiting where I can hide the drive. I do get the AirPort wireless benefits (up to 50 Mac and PCs connected, etc) and the new model AirPort Extreme lets you share a plugged-in USB hard drive, (as does the Time Capsule), but it doesn't support backing up from all connected Macs wirelessly.

For the convenience, the extra $190 was well worth it to me. The Time Capsule 1TB costs $1049 (the 500GB model costs $498).

Note that the older, non-dual-band models were still in the NZ Apple Store when I looked - they cost $799 for the 1TB and $498 for the 500.

What price convenience and security?

Mark Webster mac.nz