Simon is a hands-on software architect who works within 
[Twitter] simonbrown: Eating cream cakes in the sun at jersey zoo ... chillin'
[Coding the Architecture] Just a short note to plug a handful of sessions that Kevin and I are presenting at the upcoming Software Architect 2008 conference, 3rd-5th June, London. 1. Coding the Architecture : From Developer to Architect The first is a re-run of our ...
Living with the Time Capsule
Or not living with it, as the case may be
I've had my 500GB Time Capsule for almost a couple of months now and I thought that I'd post my thoughts, particularly since I just unplugged it as a backup device. Here's why...
- It's slow : I have a 802.11g network, with a whole host of devices including an Intel iMac, an Intel Mac mini and a PS3. I did perform the initial backups via a wired ethernet connection, but even subsequent backups are slow. For example, I dumped ~2GB of photos from my camera onto my iMac at the weekend and just the "backup preparation" stage didn't finish after about 6 hours. Who knows how long the actual backup would have taken. To be honest, most of time the backups were fairly quick, but then there were very few changes.
- It eats bandwidth : Trying to do anything when a backup is running is hard work. Surfing the web is slow and online gaming starts to lag.
- It interferes with Airport Express streaming : Every time a backup kicks in, I lose any music being streamed to my stereo via my Airport Express. Sometimes it completely cuts out, and other times it stutters in and out. Either way, you may as well stop streaming the music until the backup has completed (or cancel the backup). I've seen reports of this happening to other people.
- Backups get corrupted : This is another complaint that I've seen people making and it's happened to me - the backup images on the Time Capsule can get corrupted. If this happens, Time Machine can't mount the bundle and you basically have to delete it manually and start over. And this is a pain (see point 1). I shouldn't need to backup the backups.
There's no doubt that the Time Capsule is a great device and hassle-free wireless backups are a fantastic idea, but it just doesn't work for me. I'd love to be able to upgrade everything to 802.11n, but I can't justify buying new hardware to do this. I've since switched to backing-up my iMac using a FireWire disk and everything is far more responsive (both the iMac and the network). I'm still going to use the Time Capsule, albeit not for backups via Time Machine. Instead, I'll use it as a NAS where I can at least take control of how and when it's used.
Re: Living with the Time Capsule
Who backs up everything over a wireless network? That's your problem. If you'd used wired ethernet to get to the backup disk, you wouldn't have seen any of these issues.
To be honest, using anything as a wireless backup device and expecting it to handle gigabytes of data is really the problem here, regardless of implementation. Wireless speeds - even g or n - aren't cut out for the mass transfers.
Wired networks are the way to go; wireless networks are just for browsing from the sofa.
Re: Living with the Time Capsule
Yes it does, the ability to back upo multiple devices over a wired network. A Fw/USB disk needs to be physically moved, backup initiated, and then removed again. For me the TC works very well, but 2 of my machines are connected to it via a wired network and the other via 802.11n. I see no network performance degredation at all - or at least perceive none.