Last week I set up Mom’s TimeCapsule and new 20″ iMac so that when she returns to central New York she can get regular backups done automatically. It is pretty impressive as a backup device, network storage, 4 port LAN hub, DHCP server, and 802.11N wireless access point. As a router and firewall it is rather minimalist, and serious network weenies should probably get their own cheap firewall/router.
That, and some amazing cabling work done by co-workers Alan and Dave, inspired me to plug in our own TimeCapsule and start user-space backups of all the computers Erci and I share. I am thrilled. In our case, since we already have a Linksys firewall/router/DHCP server, our TimeCapsule is simply a faster wireless access point (802.11n/g/b) and a huge NAS disk for backups. The device handles backups from as many machines as you have space for (which was one of my big concerns), so we are backing up both laptops, and both desktops just fine (she’ll need to upgrade her iMac to Leopard for TimeMachine to work). We may even get her Windows box backing up in time. The 802.11n wireless network reaches to nearly every room in the house, which is better than the Airport Express (802.11b/g) wireless we had before.
I still use Carbon Copy Cloner to make image dumps of bootable hard drives (because TimeMachine does not make a bootable copy, at least that I can see so far), and every once in a while you want to boot from a different disk; but TimeMachine over wireless makes it trivial to get generations of revisions into a rolling incremental backup system. Very nice.
This also means that I now own two of the three big things announced at the 2008 Mac World San Francisco keynote, and I previously owned an AppleTV. Kool-aid? No, they are just reliable, useful, and affordable devices that let me focus on my life rather than perpetually fiddling with Win-bloze crap.
Post a Comment