As I wrote a few weeks ago, recently we purchased Apple's Time Capsule (500 GB model). It arrived late last week, and I'm proud to say I successfully got it set up all by myself! :-) I disconnected our Airport Extreme, listed it on Craigslist, and had a buyer for it over the weekend.
In other news, I haven't quite sold my iMac yet... I got an offer this week for $500, and I haven't accepted it or declined it yet. I was hoping to get closer to $600 for it (eBay value appears to be $550-600). Anyone have advice on what to do about this? Should I take the $500 now or wait for a better offer? Email me or leave a comment.
Anyhow, back to the point of this post... thus far I really like Time Capsule and its backup capabilities. While my initial backup took over 24 hours to complete (after 3 failed attempts of unknown reason), its incremental backups give me great peace of mind.
Today, for example, I'm writing my integration paper for Medieval and Reformation Spiritualities class. Normally when writing a paper of this size and such, I would be uploading it to Google Docs about every hour or so. Yes, I'm fairly paranoid when it comes to things like that, but I don't want to completely get rid of my (somewhat irrational) fear that my hard drive could just quit working. But now with Time Capsule, it backs up everything on my system for me automatically every hour! At the end of each day it only saves the last backup, but I take great comfort in knowing that if my computer would spontaneously combust, I'd only lose an hour's worth of work at the most... less if I manually tell it to perform a backup more often, which I sometimes do. I'll still upload versions of my papers to Google Docs for good measure (and to possibly share them on this blog site), but now I don't have to do that quite so frequently.
I still haven't gotten around to setting up my previous backup hard drive as a spare drive for my laptop, but then I haven't done anything to need a spare drive lately. I think that'll be one of my tasks for August when I'm on break from classes.
About Me
- Katie
- I am an electrical engineer during weekdays, and after earning my M.Div degree I do all sorts of ministry work outside of that.
WeeMee
4 comments:
Did you perform the initial backup over wireless, or connected via Ethernet? While for normal surfing it doesn't matter (since your connection to your modem is far slower than either), when transferring large amounts of data locally (such as your initial backup) it's a rather noticeable difference.
I don't have any numbers off hand, but Ethernet is overall much faster than wireless. I bet if you hooked your laptop directly to the router when performing the initial backup it would have gone much faster.
I seem to recall reading this as well, but I'm not positive on that.
I read that as well, that it's faster over Ethernet. I did my initial backup wirelessly, since honestly I was just too lazy to dig out an Ethernet cable! :-) If my 3rd wireless attempt had failed, that was my next option.
re selling iMac - Take the $500. Since it;s not an Intel processor and 10.6 will be Intel only, values are going down rapidly.
re backup times, cable = 100mbps, wireless (10.g) is something like 11.2 mpbs so it should be 10x faster using a cable.
As a follow up, Melissa and I ordered a Time Capsule and it showed up this weekend. I did my initial backup over ethernet, and it took about 4 hours (the backup size was about 40GB).
So, wired > wireless for the initial backup.
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