Time Capsule fills a void

By Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 16 January 2008 02:55

Home IT

Time Machine Wi-Fi backups disappear then return in a new product.

Before Mac OS X Leopard was launched, Apple talked about the ability to do Time Machine backups to a hard disk attached to an Airport base station. When the new OS shipped, that feature had vanished.

Now, less than few months later, up pops Time Capsule, Apple's new 802.11n base station with a built-in hard drive, awakening my inner cynic.

"Bring Time Capsule home, plug it in, click a few buttons on your Macs and voila — all the Macs in your house are being backed up automatically, every hour of every day," said Apple CEO Steve Jobs. "With Time Capsule and Time Machine, all your irreplaceable photos, movies and documents are automatically protected and incredibly easy to retrieve if they are ever lost."

Very sensible, and very worthy. But since Time Machine worked with volumes shared across a network, and now works with Time Capsule, why doesn't it work with an Airport-connected drive? Maybe there were some technical issues, but surely they could have been ironed out rather than expecting people to buy a whole new device.

Still, Time Capsule has some useful features, including three Gigabit Ethernet ports for a wired network, WPA-2, and NAT-PMP to better support iChat, Back to My Mac and other software.

Two versions are available. The 500G unit costs $US299/$A429, while the 1T model is $US499/$A699.

The hard drive isn't limited to Time Machine - it's also accessible as a general-purpose network drive. Furthermore, another hard disk or a shared printer can be added via the USB port. Humm, I wonder if that drive works with Time Machine too?