Apple unearths Time Capsule

If It Won't Use an External as a Backup, It's a Doorstop

I use a Drobo.

Screw "server grade."

It's the chain mail one...

Server grade?

On apple maybe. But in the real world, anyone here not using 15k SAS drives?

Wired or wireless, it's still on site

I wish I could direct TimeMachine to backup to web-hosted storage. I can see the advantage of TimeCapsule for users with multiple computers, but for just one computer, a wireless backup has the same problem that a wired one has - it's still on-site.

I'll bet my left nut that Apple adds this as a feature to .Mac eventually.

Flames, because they destroy backups on-site.

Better buy a REAL NAS to backup what you BU to this POS

If this is like ANY other Mac gadget Apple has produced in the last two decades (like all the flaky PowerBooks, G3 and G4 PowerBooks, iBooks, MacIntel MacBooks and Pros, Airport Extreme or Express, etc etc. - you had BETTER also buy a REAL NAS to backup what you backup to this piece of shit from Apple.

Ps - for the Apple Kool Aid Drinkers, you had better acknowledge the years of Flaky Apple products because there are thousands of web pages to document the proof. It's posted daily or in the archives of sites like macfixit. You can't run from the TRUTH.

from a Kool Aid Drinker

Actually, I backup the mac's in the house (3 of them - no problems, despite all the, er, apparently thousands of web pages telling me I should have (sorry about that Webster - perhaps I should start poking around with a screwdriver or something? Would that make you happy?)) to an external drive mounted on a mac mini and shared across both wired and wireless networking

I've set up time machine on all of them, and it works just fine.

Kool Aid?

I bought my first Mac back in 1991, and I've been using them ever since.

But I've never heard of 'Kool Aid', let alone ever drunk any.

What is it, pray tell? Something burger-munching morbidly obese Americans go for? (along with Creationism, gun worship, sub-prime mortgages and the laughing stock that is the Republican party).

@Webster

HeyGuys, lay off Webster.

If it weren't for him, we would not be aware of just how sane & normal everyone else is.

@ andy - careful when mentioning Apple's US pricing

You'll get reamed by lots of "smart" people who'll lecture you about VAT and import duty ad nauseum infinitum who clearly have nothing better to do with their online time ...

Tim

for a segment this is an excellent idea....

ok, im a Mac convert, but that aside, I think this an excellent product...

Yes, all us techy types with home fibre channel sans and multiple gigabit connections to secure offsite storage, plus the knowlegde to support the VPN links between these sites, this is a waste of time... but...

the the average end user, you know, the ones that are incapable of resisting the ugrge to open an email attatchment from an unknown source entitled 'run me i kill your pc.exe' (yes i know i have my OS's mixed up and the aaverage mac user, blah, blah, blah...) this is a nice simple way of backing up.

idiot end user unboxes time capsule...

plugs in

runs airport manager

runs time machine

simple.. in less than 10 mouse clicks their data is backed up transparantly without setting ardous jobs and schedules, on a second device... no, it may not survive if the world implodes, but it offers a level of data resilience...

you need to realise, this isnt an enterprise backup solution!!! just a compact, tidy unit for home users.... :)

Sad face representing a Windows user trying to restore a document backed up using Microsoft Backup ;)

Matt gets it

It's not designed for the sort of people that read and post here. How boring to see (once again) people jumping on the 'hey let's bash Apple' bandwagon - it's a bit like shooting fish in a barrel but don't let that stop you from feeling all superior.

It's a consumer product, it's intended to give non-professional people a simple and cost-effective way to achieve seamless, continual background backups (via Time Machine). It just sits there and backs-up your data, over wi-fi or over wired ethernet (or both), from one or more Macs. That's a pretty noble thing to try and bring to the consumer market. Only time will tell as to whether or not it's actually reliable enough for this purpose, or whether it's genuinely an economical solution, but at least give Apple some kudos for trying to take a confusing, non-sexy but important area of (home) computing and trying to provide a simple, non-invasive solution for the non-techies.

They put it in the same box as their home/soho router solution. If you're setting up a Mac-based home/soho system (and despite what the Reg might have you believe, people actually do), this is a pretty neat solution.

Sure, your router and your backups are in the same box, but this is a step-up from having no backups whatsoever, or only backing up when people remember to backup, which we all know is usually the case with home/soho networks.

Happy face because this is a positive idea - expect to see more of this kind of thing (probably cheaper, probably 'better') from other companies in the near future.

As a backup it is a mirror i.e. ~RAID1

If the Time Capsule (TC) has a COPY of what is on your machine, then if the TC drive dies, you get another one and make another copy from your machine.

I'll probably be getting one...

As Matt says, this isn't enterprise grade.

Also of interest is the fact that any NAS can be made wirelessly Time Machine compliant with a simple Terminal command (I forget what it is, but I'm sure it can be Googled). There is a bit of a risk -- Time Machine thinks that the data has successfully been written to disc when the router says it has received tha packet (but before any actual disc writing). Thus there is a possibility of some data not being written. Time Capsule gets around this with some magic jiggery-pokery.

The other issue with using most consumer NAS is that they use Samba, which is just way to slow (maybe Vista users don't notice, what with the cripplingly slow network storage access you get -- DOCUMENTED PROOF ON MANY WEBSITES, WEBSTER YOU FRUITCAKE).

I also want to replace the hopeless wireless router that Sky force on you (now that I've found a way of extracting the hard code -- and guessable -- username and password). I think Sky's idea of security is to rebrand a Netgear router that has such a poor range that only someone in the same room can attach to it. Hoorah for 802.11n!

eh?

"currently the only really practical way to use Mac OS X Leopard's backup program Time Machine"

You mean apart from a shared drive on another Leopard machine? It won't backup to DAV or Samba shares, but to another Mac over afp? Sure, that'll work over wifi.

Those of us with laptops have relegated our older macs to headless servers in our kitchen cupboards running screen sharing. Plugging stacks of HDDs into them and sharing them gives us our backups without Time Capsules.

@Shakje

Shakie, old lad:-

Wasn't aware of Jobs saying that:- It's just The Phreakster's preaching (much like an ultra-fundamentalist Ayatollah), lack of reasoned argument and continued diatribe of undiluted venom makes me fear for the old loon's health, as he's bound to rupture something one of these days...

He does serve a purpose, though - as without madness we would be unaware of normality - much as without darkness we would be unaware of light...

Paris because she serves a purpose by making most other blondes seem positively intellectual...

@As a backup it is a mirror i.e. ~RAID1

Disclaimer: I'm a Mac user, plus Solaris, Linux, Window$ etc, but I try to avoid Kool Aid ;-)

The point of Time Machine, apart from obviously being a backup, is that when you delete files on your Mac, you can retrieve them from your Time Machine backups.

So, when the Time Capsule disk dies you can't replace the data on it with what's on your Mac's HD, because the Time Capsule disk also contained all the files you deleted from your Mac over the months... see what I mean? You might want some of them back one day when you ask yourself "where have those files gone???"

Some more thoughts on Time Capsule:

I like Apple for simplifying things. They are great at doing that! And this is a simple solution for the typical Mac user, not cheap though.

Sometimes simple can be dangerous though -- consider what happens when the disk inside Time Capsule dies -- you lose your whole backup solution immediately, with err… no backup apart from your source drive perhaps, but see above, and then when you send the box back to Apple (shop), you lose your network too! Arrggghhh! ;-) Ooh, better remember to remove the pr0n too ;-) Oh hang on, the drive is dead though -- uh oh!

They say the hard drive is "server grade" which probably means it's an Enterprise SATA drive -- i.e. designed to be able to spin 24 hours a day in an enterprise RAID / NAS box. But that doesn't cost a lot more anyway for enterprise SATA disks (I don't mean SAS disks!). Let's hope it has good ventilation fans too to keep the drive cool. Data doesn't last too long on hot drives.

I suspect that Apple will only enable Time Machine to work with this box as a network drive until several months have passed and they have made their money, and people's voices have complained enough that they can't use their standard Samba/NFS share as a Time Machine target. We'll see!

As I'm a geek, I've built my own fileserver/NAS + backup solution built upon Sun Solaris and ZFS (all free and open source), and shared it to my Mac via Samba (CIFS). NFS sharing works too, as does iSCSI. See more about the amazing ZFS file system here:

1. http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS

So I expect my NAS box will remain unusable via Time Machine for quite a while. But then I have 2 other possibities until that time:

1) Use 'rsync -a source dest' to create backups similar to what Time Machine does (TM relies on the use of 'hard links')

-- see here: http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/

-- and here: http://rsync.samba.org/examples.html

The above done via a Samba/NFS-shared target (i.e. writing to the Sun Solaris-hosted ZFS pool via Samba/NFS sharing).

2) See if I can use the Mac's ZFS implementation (from developer.apple.com) to do ZFS snapshots to a remote machine

And one of these 2 solutions is probably just as good as Time Machine for keeping data backed up -- just without the pretty interface :)

Oh, and I have redundancy built in, using single-bit parity RAID (RAIDZ1), plus a backup on another Solaris box done via an iSCSI link (iSCSI is free, out of the box in Sun Solaris too :).

If it's of any interest, I will explain this setup at http://breden.org.uk this weekend, if I get time, at least I'll kick off a series of HowTo articles.

But I do take my hat off to Apple for making a simple solution that anyone can use, even if it does have its faults. It should work for most people, and that's already a great step forward for most people -- having automatic, regular backups.

Now, hopefully Apple will open up Time Machine to working with non-Apple network drives/NAS solutions... play nicely, Apple ;-)

OK then, I'll get me coat -- it's the one with Sun/ZFS written on it ;-)

Why I'd Like It to Work, and Don't Think It Will

I use an AEBS with the "unsupported disks" hack to mount a Drobo disk over AFP. I back up regularly over 802.11n (Apple Version), and it has been working very well since December. There's no question that it works. I have done a couple of restores, and regularly browse to ensure backup integrity. I do offsite backups of important/secure stuff, but that's not a Time Machine regimen. It's much more a classic "dump n' burn" type of thing.

If no one is familiar with a Drobo, it's a pretty nice piece of kit. It's a "slobo," so you want to use it over a network, but it is robust as hell. A LOT cheaper than RAID 5 (I set up about 1.7TB of redundant storage for about $700).

What I get tired of are extremely long "Preparing" and "Finishing" sessions in my backups. The backups are not considered done unless all three phases have completed ("Preparing", "Backing Up", "Finishing"). In many cases, the "Preparing" phase is a lot longer than the "Backing Up" phase. I'm pretty sure that this is because Time Machine is sorting out the prior backups on the disk. It probably does this in a fairly primitive manner across the mounted file system.

I am assuming that Time Capsule has a client/server architecture, where the TC unit does a lot of the "sorting out" in the unit itself, as opposed to making the computer do it. What concerns me is that it does this only for the internal disk, and external disks are treated in exactly the same manner as they are currently treated by the AEBS. I have asked several people at Apple (including so-called "geniuses") about this, and have received blank stares, so the prognosis isn't good.

Unless Apple can convince me that the TC will offer a significant improvement over my current system, I see no reason to get one. As was noted above, this isn't aimed at people like me. It is aimed at home users who have never had a backup in the first place. I don't think they lose any sleep over the thought that I won't buy a TC for my setup.

Interestingly...

I have a Maplin networked hard drive enclosure that Time Machine sees quite happily. It uses Ximeta's NDAS technology, which needs a third party driver, but once up, it mounts on my desktop and Time Machine actually offered to use it the first time I installed it.

Oh, and @giles: I agree, Webster is a dribbling loon, but unless things have changed in the last couple of years, Kraftwerk use Sony Vaios on stage as they use a lot of (unfortunately) Windows based software.

Fluorescent checked (and unfortunately lumpy) cycling outfit, ta

@ webster

I'd be interested to know what equipment you use, I'm sure there are million pages on how bad that is.

Backing up over wifi

Hi, I am not technologically minded it has to be said but I keep reading that TM won't back up over wifi.

I must be real clever then because since day one of leopard I set up my macbook to backup to a harddrive attached to my mini upstairs and its worked flawlessly. I even had to use it the other day ;) No problem what so ever. Whats more I can back up with the macbook plugged into the network or wirelessly. On occasion a mount appears on the macbook and the back up starts then it goes when done.

Seems simple enough.

Richard Drysdall

You're completely missing the point of this product. It is clearly designed to sit in a DOMESTIC study and back up the contents of a PERSONAL users MacBook or MacBookPro, whilst also providing HOME WiFi and limited wired routing. As such, it extremely attractive. Small, neat and (if my APE is anything to go by) offering superb WiFi performance.

BTW, I assume that Apple has used a Seagate "ES" HDD, hence their 'server grade' tag.

yawn

Its by Apple so it must be a rip off. You don't need to read Reg articles about Apple products any more. This has to be journalism at its easiest.

Never owned a mac, but...

The theorem that any backup is better than no-backup is only true, if you don't scale it. However, for the people with the photos and emails and idunnowhats that this gadget targets, this gives a different magnitude of the order of datasecurity, and would serve them well. I wish I had one of those, except maybe I'd think it's wasting space and use it for primary storage anyway.

My backup file is 11mb, and I keep it on the internets.

ZFS Home Fileserver / NAS

As promised earlier, I've written up details on how to create your own fileserver / backup target machine based on Sun Solaris and using the ZFS filesystem.

I will update it soon to show you how you can achieve Time Machine / Time Capsule functionality with this commodity hardware and open source software using rsync.

See here:

http://breden.org.uk/2008/03/02/a-home-fileserver-using-zfs/