SpiceWare's Blog

you had to get a shot of an apple product didn't you, I guess you were playing with it while you were eating your home made cookies

huh?

 

Oh - that box in the background is a Time Capsule, an early Xmas gift for my brother.

 

He inherited my old 2006 MacBook when I bought my current MacBook Pro at the end of 2008. I'd set them up with an external drive for Time Machine (backups). They used it a couple times, but got out of habit of plugging it in as they don't have a "computer desk" or anything-they just set the laptop up on the kitchen table whenever they use it. When the MacBook's hard drive failed last summer, they lost a bunch of photos and such.

 

The Time Capsule is a WiFi router with an integrated hard drive for doing backups. As soon as they power up the MacBook, it connects and does a system backup every hour (not a full backup, just what's changed since the last backup).

I bought a Time Capsule with my latest iMac - excellent product. Admittedly, just buying an cheap external drive would do the trick too, but I really like the "set it and forget it" aspect of wireless backups. It's always on*, always there, available to all of the computers on my network, and I can back up manually whenever I want, too.

 

* I bought a UPS for my system as well.

One nice thing is the Time Capsule will back up multiple systems as well. My nephew inherited my dad's 2009 MBP* when he bought a new one over Xmas. I need check with him to see if he set himself up on the Time Capsule.

 

 

* my mom has an Air and even though it's half the speed of the MBP it boot and launched programs faster because it has an SSD. Dad had an SSD shipped to my place for when they got here from Africa for the holidays. We copied and tested it externally and it worked just fine, but once installed in the MBP it would randomly crash. There's a bug in the chipset of some of the 2009 MBPs that conflict with SSD. So he bought a new MBP. Boy was he excited when I showed him how to increase the graphic settings in his games (Starcraft 2, Civilization, etc).

The one advantage of using an external drive for backups is you can stick it in a safe. A decent sized safe is only $100-$150 an will provide reasonable protection from fire & water.

 

Offsite (via internet) is another option, but has an ongoing cost.