First Impressions: Apple Time Capsule
We just received our Apple Time Capsule this week, and it’s happily backing up my files right now. Time Capsule, in case you haven’t heard of it, is a WiFi hub that supports the new 802.1n standard and also contains a hard drive for backups using the Time Machine feature of OS X Leopard.
I purchased the 1 TB model, which costs $500. A 500GB model is available for a much more reasonable $300. I won’t be able to do a detailed review until a month or two has gone by, so I can try restoring some backups, but in the meantime here are some first impressions:
- It’s big. I imagined it being the size of a Mac Mini, but it’s actually wider, about 8″ square.
- Setting it up with the included software was very simple.
- There are very few settings—I can add drives or folders to a list of things not to back up, but that’s about it.
- Not surprisingly, backing up over the network is slow. My iMac, hooked directly to the Time Capsule with gigabit Ethernet, has managed to back up 223 GB in about 15 hours. Laura’s computer, hooked up to our old non-gigabit network, is taking much longer. I hesitate to imagine how long the first backup would take over WiFi.
- During at least the first backup, a little progress dialog pops up. This seems contrary to the “invisible” approach Apple otherwise takes with Time Machine. If the progress dialog pops up every hour while I’m working to do hourly backups, I’m going to be truly annoyed.
- Apple includes documentation for both Mac and Windows computers, but Windows simply sees the device as a network drive. If you’re strictly a Windows user, you could definitely beat the price by buying a separate WiFi hub and hard drive.
So far… so good. I’ll post further after I’ve had a catastrophe or two and seen whether Time Capsule saves me.
Your Ethernet backup time seems slow to me. I backed up 42GB from my MacBook via Ethernet in under 2.5 ours. I backed up 160GB from my iMac in less than 8 hours.
Did you have AirPort ON during the backup? I did that initially and found TM was using the AP connection instead of Ethernet. I had to kill the backup, turn AP OFF, and then start a new backup to ensure the Ethernet connection was used.
Comment by Tom — March 7, 2008 @ 4:11 pm
The biggest problem I see with Time Capsule (and Time Machine) is that it really doesn’t work with FileVault encrypted user accounts. Anyone with a Mac portable who uses FileVault (and IMHO anyone with a laptop should use FileVault in case the computer is lost or stolen) is out of luck for back ups. The only way to do it is log out, log in as another user, and back up the entire encrypted user directory as one massive file. Not practical, and so much for Apple’s famed “it just works.”
Comment by Bruce — March 8, 2008 @ 4:45 pm
I’ve seen the FileVault complaint before and I think it is more of a condemnation of FileVault than Time Machine. There are other ways to encrypt sensitive data and no reasonable way to backup FileVault, do to it’s very nature (except for nightly clone backups).
Comment by Doug — March 10, 2008 @ 2:02 am
The previous posters are wrong about how FileVault work. There seems to be this common misconception on the net that you need to log in as a different user and back up an entire FileVault user partition at once; this is out of date. For a FileVault parition CREATED UNDER LEOPARD none of this is true; the data is kept in sparse banded encryption set. You can back it up from within the user account while logged in, and yes you can do it using Time Machine; despite a warning dialog when you set it up, it works perfectly. It is fast and gets only the changes. The backup is encrypted and can be accessed on another Mac by providing your home (encryption) password. The backup can not be accessed through the Time Machine UI; it shows up as a normal disk partition though and you can drag files from it to your home dir as needed to recover. FileVault partitions created before Leopard behave differently; if you have one, you should re-create it under Leopard and copy the data into it to make it a sparse-banded backup.
I would really like to know whether Time Capsule and File Vault play well together. I have a feeling I’m going to have to buy it to find out though because, somewhat dismayingly, everyone out there seems to not understand how their FileVault works (but posts incorrect info anyway). I run the above setup every day and I have verified all functionality described.
Comment by David — March 30, 2008 @ 8:58 am