2 Votes
Apple Time Capsule Alternatives
I’ve (almost) filled up my iMac hard drive. I’ve been eyeing the Apple Time Capsule for a while now. It looks great, would upgrade my home network, and would work “seamlessly” with Time Machine. It would also nicely accommodate the addition of a MacBook to our family, but at $500 I can’t help wondering if my money would be better used elsewhere.
Getting the 500 GB model provides some easy cost relief, but will that be enough room to last over the long haul? I have over 100 GBs of music (and growing), we take a large number of photos / short videos, and we are avid iWeb users. In the future we might even start using GarageBand or iMovie more. All of that adds up to a quickly expanding family media library, and I don’t want to find myself in the same situation a couple of years down the road.
So, what’s your best solution? Here are the criteria:
- wireless backup with Time Machine
- enough hard drive space to last five years
- home network of iMac, MacBook and Canon wireless printer – plus anyone that visits (or parks in my driveway)
- under $500
Similarly tagged OmniNerd content:
- Create an iCal To-Do Item from Address Book with AppleScript, by Brandon about 3 years ago
- Fixing Time Capsule Read Only Error, by Brandon almost 4 years ago
- Hard Drive Repair for Time Capsule With Internal Drive Error, by Brandon about 4 years ago
- Data Recovery Plan for Time Capsule With Internal Drive Error, by Brandon about 4 years ago
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Loose Specs by markmcb
Your specs are pretty vague. Try replacing “five years” with ?? terabytes.
Any wireless hard drive will do if you’re willing to perform a little hackery to bypass the overly simple interfaces.
rsyncx by VnutZ
I think I’ve presently got nearly both of my 500GB hard drives full between two computers and already overwhelmed my third 500GB drive used as a backup. My backup solution was simple – rsyncx with compression. Just invest your money in the drives – I think a terabyte is less than $200 now. Unless I’m mistaken, Time Machine itself isn’t going to do anything with regard to your available capacity.
Drobo by Anonymous
Try use drobo (http://www.drobo.com/) and you can change the internal hard drive any time you want
Check out Buffalo Tech's NAS options by fotoguru
These guys have a whole line of low cost and well reviewed products.
http://www.buffalotech.com/products/network-storage/
I just ordered a Buffalo Tech LinkStation Liveâ„¢ LS-CHL, with
1000GB of 7200 rpm storage,
1 Gb Ethernet,
Apple Time Machine support
USB Printer and additional HD support
and other features like secure web access.
Total cost: $205 including s/h from Electronics Showplace.
They have other products supporting more TB, RAID arrays, etc.
I plan to just plug it into my router and use it to back up my laptops.
Buffalo Tech has online knowledge base articles for setting up time machine and printer access from your mac.