Apple Time Capsule or other Wifi Access point for Time Machine backups in 2011?

January 24, 2011 11:12 AM

Apple Time Capsule or other Wifi Access point for Time Machine backups? (also when do you think Time Machine refresh will occur?)

We've been having long-standing Wifi problems with Linksys / NetGear routers and our modern Apple macbooks as others have seen as well.

I'm looking to get a Apple Time capsule under the assumption that this will fix these annoying connection problems.

A couple of questions:

When do people think a refresh will occur? The 1TB for $299 and a 2TB for $499! seem a little pricey.

We have a mix of devices some N (laptops), some G (Tivo and iPhone), some hardwired 10-Base-T (HP 5N Laser printer) any thoughts on best practices for having the fastest network (I have already read this ask-mefi post already)

Any other device suggestions for Time Machine compatible backups?

We are also going to be doing offsite network backups but am looking for fixing the local network and local backup problem.

posted by bottlebrushtree to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

Apple has maintained the same price points for the Time Capsule since launch. $299/$499. You get more storage and a better radio now, but the cost is the same. I would suspect the next refresh Junish and depending on the HDD market pricing they might bump the capacities up but keep the prices the same.

So to save money you can do like hal_c_on suggests and go refurb.

Or it you already have an external HDD, you can get an Airport Extreme and plug the HDD into it and get the same Time Machine over the air backups as you would on a Time Capsule. This is I do. Except I plug a powered USB hub into the Time Machine and now have a 3 external hard drives and 2 printers hooked up to it. One of the volumes is for Time Machine backups (one is going on right now and doesn't impact performance).

The newer Time Capsules/Airport Extreme units have separate radios so you can keep your N and G networks separate without worrying about a pokey G device slowing down the whole network. My Airport Extreme didn't have that but all of my wireless devices are now N. I plug my Tivo into one of the ethernet jacks.

I'm a huge fan of the Airport Extreme. Mine is going on 3 years old and it just doesn't crash. I live in a building where at any given moment there's 20+ wifi routers out there, microwaves, cordless phones, baby monitors, etc and it just keeps chugging along (there was a time when I would have to reboot it about once a month, but there was a firmware update that brought it back to bulletproof status). Yes, it cost more than other routers and isn't hackable like the old Linksys but it gets me close to 100% uptime. My Linksys/Buffalo/Netgear would break when my upstairs neighbor got home from work every night at 8:10-8:30 and popped something in the microwave. Not a problem now.
posted by birdherder at 12:10 PM on January 24, 2011

Oh, using an Airport Extreme and an attached USB hard drive is sort of supported by Apple. I mean, they provide how to set it up and firmware upgrades don't break it. There's no "jailbreaking" necessary. But due to the number of USB hdd out there, they're not going to spend hours at the genius bar or on the phone helping you. 99.9% of the time it will "just work". And of that 0.1% times it doesn't, power cycling the router will fix it 99.9%. (note: remember the Time Machine volume must be HFS+ formatted.... if you have a big 2TB HDD and only want to use part of it for TimeMachine, you can always partition it in Disk Utility and make the other partition FAT32/NTFS or another separate HFS+partition. In my setup, I have my Time Machine backup of a 250GB MacBook Pro HDD onto a 1TB "until full" but still have other folders I can access taking up about 250GB leaving 750GB to Time Machine. As updates are incremental, it takes while to fill the whole thing.
posted by birdherder at 12:18 PM on January 24, 2011

What is your current hardware and what kind of connection problems have you been having? Depending on the nature of your problems, replacing your current wireless router may or may not fix your issues.

Nothing against the Airport Extreme or Time Capsule (I own 3 generations of AEBS and the more recent ones are more or less rock-solid), but there are many things that can cause wifi problems.
posted by strangecargo at 1:22 PM on January 24, 2011

I have the 1GB Time Capsule and used it for a while to replace my trusty Linksys router. The TC worked fine for backing up my Macs and for Wifi for those machines. Where it failed, however, was with my iPhone 4. Wifi on the phone is slower than EDGE with the TC, and no amount of tweaking the network type, channel or any other settings had any effect. It was also very buggy connecting to my modem and getting it set up was an exercise in frustration. I ended up going back to my Linksys and connecting the TC to one of the latter's ports so I could continue to use it as a backup.
posted by hollisimo at 1:44 PM on January 24, 2011

Can your routers run the alternate firmware? I have a setup using two ancient WRT54G routers (Rev 1 and 3) running as DHCP and extender (tied to 1st router with a 50' Cat5E cable), respectively, on Tomato firmware. Mac Mini plugged into the DHCP serving router, two FireWire drives daisy-chained onto the Mini; one is basic backup, the other is a Time Machine backup of my MacBook Pro. I do the Time Machine backups either over WiFi or (if I know I added a lot of photos, etc.) I plug it in using an ethernet cable prior to launching the backup.

I also use a utility (MarcoPolo) to set context-sensitive rules on my laptop, so that (for example) when I am not at home, it detects this, and runs a shell script to disable Time Machine until I return home, when it re-enables it. Keeps it from trying to back up or prompting me for backups when I am not on my home network. (MarcoPolo works on Snow Leopard but has some quirks; has not been updated in a while which makes me sad.)
posted by caution live frogs at 1:47 PM on January 24, 2011

I have a Time Capsule and wouldn't buy another. I'd be more inclined towards the Airport Extreme (or other router if Time Machine is supported on non-Apple routers?) plus external drives solution people are talking about here. My experience has been weird: the TC hard drive failed for me within a few months of purchase. Bizarrely, though, it came back to life the following year and it still works.

But I now occasionally hear noises from it which are allegedly the sound of power supply capacitors dying. See this and this.

To me the biggest issue with the TC is the fact that you have to break it open to replace the drive and you can't power it down -- you have to turn off the mains supply when you think the disk has spun down. It feels like poor design. I sometimes think about cracking it open and replacing the hard drive but if the power supply is going to fail eventually, what's the point?

And I'll lose my wifi router at that point, too.
posted by galaksit at 1:48 PM on January 24, 2011

I also use an Airport Extreme with a USB hard drive plugged into it to replicate the time machine experience at a far lower cost.. and if and when the hard drive dies, it won't take my router with it, which is an added bonus.
posted by modernnomad at 2:25 PM on January 24, 2011

Another vote for the Airport Extreme and USB hard drive. Not quite as compact as the time capsule, but much cheaper. Works fine for Time Machine backups.

I have a fairly recent Airport Extreme and a bunch of different devices on the network (an iPhone 3G, and iPhone 4, an old G4 Powerbook, an XBox360 and PS3 (both wired to the Airport Extreme), and wireless speeds between my N iMac and the Airport Extreme seem fine. Certainly fast enough to stream movie files off the Airport Extreme's USB HD to the iMac over the wireless network. I haven't made any special effort to set it up in any particular way to make it fast – it just seems to work.
posted by damonism at 4:48 PM on January 24, 2011

I used Airport Extreme and USB hard drive for a couple of years but had problems remembering to do my back-ups. I have had a 1TB Time Capsule since last September and wouldn't go back. I've had no technical problems and don't notice any loss of wifi speed on m iPhone as alluded to above. If you're not organized and want something to automatically do your back-up for you, here's one vote for Time Capsule.
posted by birdwatcher at 4:36 AM on January 25, 2011

Birdwatcher -- do you mean you had problems remembering to do backups when you had AEBS+USB, or that that combination did not work as well for you with the Time Machine backup technology as a dedicated Time Capsule has? Because at least in principle, AEBS+USB also automatically does your backups for you, doesn't it? I thought Time Capsules were simply the elegant all in one solution, not that they were functionally different wrt Time Machine features.
posted by galaksit at 6:25 AM on January 25, 2011

Response by poster: I ended up getting the 1T refurbished model off of Apple.com. It arrived the very next day much to my surprise.

Got it up and running in a couple minutes and got all of our laptops backup up with in a day.

The slightly (perhaps un-)surprising thing was the difference in statistics, geeky info and metrics that the Linksys and D-Link firmware let you see compared to the Apple setup.

While I know that I have WPA set up, the Apple interface is a little confusing at first and made it look like it wasn't.

Thanks all!
posted by bottlebrushtree at 4:28 PM on February 10, 2011