Apple Airport Time Casule

Jb_1982

Hi there,

I have had an iMac for a few years now and I've got to the point where I'm debating whether or not to purchase the Apple Airport Time Capsule 3TB. Has anyone had or got one of these? And would you recommend them or not? Are they worth the £300-£400 they cost to buy one? I understand they are good for time machine backups etc, they also backup photos too don't they? Can you delete photos off you iMac once they've been backed up to the Airport? Any advice is appreciated, thanks in advance. JB

TadleyBaggie

I've got an old-style (flat not a tower) 3GB Time Capsule and have used it for 4 years or so to back up my MacBook Pro via Time Machine. It has worked well, had to do a full restore once and it completed without a hitch. I also use it to host my iTunes library.

I'm not aware of any inbuilt photo backup facility however. Basically it's just a router with an attached hard drive.

dauphin

Note that Apple has ceased development of these products and is rumoured to be discontinuing them altogether.

Jb_1982

Thanks for that info guys. Maybe worth waiting until the price comes down then.

shopbot

Jb_1982 wrote: »

Hi there,

Can you delete photos off you iMac once they've been backed up to the Airport? JB

Do you have any other back up strategies? It's not a really back up if you delete them from the Mac and the Time Capsule is your only copy. What happens if it breaks or gets stolen?

Google the 3-2-1 Backup rule for the best strategy.

Undervalued

As I understand it, some of the Western Digital personal cloud units can be configured to work nicely with Apple Time Machine. They do some with two hard drives that can be configured as a RAID drive. The data is then written to both disks.

Obviously this doesn't protect you from fire or flood type risks but it is pretty unlikely that both drives will fail at the same time.

Jb_1982

shopbot wrote: »

Do you have any other back up strategies? It's not a really back up if you delete them from the Mac and the Time Capsule is your only copy. What happens if it breaks or gets stolen?

Google the 3-2-1 Backup rule for the best strategy.

Yes, of course. I use Knowhow cloud with 4TB worth of storage available, and I also have a 1TB physical drive, plus my iMac. Just wondered if the time capsule meant I could clear some of the iMacs drive that's all. Not a major problem, was hoping for a simpler Hard Drive system.

Thanks JB

wba31

Jb_1982 wrote: »

Yes, of course. I use Knowhow cloud with 4TB worth of storage available, and I also have a 1TB physical drive, plus my iMac. Just wondered if the time capsule meant I could clear some of the iMacs drive that's all. Not a major problem, was hoping for a simpler Hard Drive system.

Thanks JB

If you have an iMac and want to free up HDD space why not just buy an external drive to sit on the desk? Something like, but not necessarily this https://www.amazon.co.uk/Elements-Desktop-External-Drive-WDBWLG0040HBK-EESN/dp/B00JT8AJZ0/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1484555330&sr=8-3&keywords=western+digital+external+hard+drive

I have a Lacie drive hooked up to my imac, is always on. My entire iTunes library is on there, as are all my Lightroom photos and videos from iMovie etc.
I have AppleTV in my living room and when selecting media files on that (which are on the external HDD connected to the iMac) it streams them effortlessly.

I have a 2TB drive which means i only use about 10% of my iMac's drive...

Undervalued

Jb_1982 wrote: »

Hi there,

I have had an iMac for a few years now and I've got to the point where I'm debating whether or not to purchase the Apple Airport Time Capsule 3TB. Has anyone had or got one of these? And would you recommend them or not? Are they worth the £300-£400 they cost to buy one? I understand they are good for time machine backups etc, they also backup photos too don't they? Can you delete photos off you iMac once they've been backed up to the Airport? Any advice is appreciated, thanks in advance. JB

One further idea, depending on the age of you iMac.

If it is one of the slightly thicker models that has a DVD writer it is relatively easy to remove the DVD drive and replace it with an additional hard disk. After all DVD drives are a thing of the past and no current Mac has one.

If you are going down that route it probably makes sense to replace the existing hard disk with a SSD at the same time. The performance increase is amazing! If you don't want to reinstall all your software you can clone the existing hard disk to the SSD before installing it.

There are plenty of excellent guides on line showing how to do it all and, as long as you are reasonably practical, removing the glass to get inside is not a scary as t first seems!

Finally the DVD drive you remove, like everything Mac, will have a worthwhile sale value of eBay.

Mr_Toad

I've been a Mac user for years and have one of the older flat Time Capsules.

It's rather more than just a NAS drive. As already stated it's a router complete with Wifi. Mine started out as a 1TB unit until I replaced the disk with a 3TB one.

As others have said deleting stuff off the Mac and relying on the backup on the Time Capsule is not a great idea.

One of the main reasons for this is that Time Machine will keep adding backups until the disk or the assigned space for backups is full then it starts to automatically delete the oldest backups to make room for the new meaning that eventually the backup containing the stuff you removed from the Mac will be gone.

You can turn this off.

Also Time Machine can, in my experience, can see pretty much any external USB drive or NAS. I have both a 4TB WD My Cloud and Synology NAS drives on my network and Time Machine can back up to both of them.

rhysadams

If you've got a spare hard drive knocking around, you can buy a Raspberry Pi3 for about £30 and with a bit of easy coding and a website you can make your own Time Capsule.

If you want backup of photos, I use both the free Flickr and Google Photos backup