Alternatives to Time Capsule?

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clasqm

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Well, I moved my home office and everything works, except that my Time Machine disk mysteriously gave up the ghost. So I'm living dangerously at the moment (well, not really, everything that is truly lose-your-house-stuff is dropboxed across to the laptop and the work PC). I need a 1.5 to 2 TB backup volume. My iMac was one of the last pre-Thunderbolt models, so I have the following options:

  • Get another USB HD. Cheap, convenient, easy. But then I'd have to stick in an ugly powered USB hub since all my ports are in use. I haven't had much luck with hubs. sometimes they work flawlessly, and sometimes they stop working for absolutely no visible reason, only to start working again tomorrow. Still, if it's gotta be, it's gotta be.
  • Finally find a use for that Firewire800 port that I've never stuck anything into. Uhh, Firewhat? Can you even buy Firewire peripherals in South Africa? I've never seen one in the wild. Any advice would be muchos apreciados. As a FW ignoramus I would be interested to hear what the advantages are.
  • Go NAS! I looked at the Apple Time Capsule and rejected the idea after I pulled myself off the floor. Do they expect me to sell my firstborn into slavery to buy a backup disk? Besides, I don't need another wifi router - wifey complains she can't move for all the wifi routers cluttering up the house. Anyone know of a more reasonably priced alternative?


TIA
 
USB hard drive is a solid choice. It's the cheapest, and works quickly and easily. I recommend getting a hub and a USB drive.

Firewire for externals is a rip-off. You pay way more and it's really not worth it IMO.

The Time Capsule is a fine piece of hardware, a very good router, but the price, yowza! And believe me, it's slow over wifi. Since you already have a router, well it's just overkill.

Oh, one great piece of software you should check out is superduper. It creates a bootable image of your Mac, which is way handy, since if you lose a drive, you just boot from the backup - whereas with TM, you have to first perform a lengthy restore. It makes for a great alternative/complement to Time Machine.
 
Windows Home Server 2011 supported Time Machine backups with Snow Leopard but Apple changed some network settings on Lion and it doesn't work anymore.

Except for buying a Time Capsule or using an external USB hard drive, the other options are even more expensive. If you have a Mac Mini, iMac or Mac Pro, the shared networked drives on those desktops will support wireless Time Machine backups.

I was hoping that an eventual update for Lion will support Time Backups to Windows networked shares, like on Snow Leopard, but we're already on 10.7.3 and nothing's changed.
 
I wonder if network backup still works to a linux server.
 
clasqm said:
Any advice would be muchos apreciados. As a FW ignoramus I would be interested to hear what the advantages are.
Click to expand...

FireWire doesn't rely on the computer's CPU, like USB does. You'd think that, given how powerful CPUs are today, this would not matter, but it does. The worst FireWire enclosure I've owned still comfortably outperformed the best USB devices I've come across for transfer rates.

We all know Apple is ruthless about discontinuing things when they don't see value in it or have a replacement available. But somehow the MacBook Pros still have a FireWire port...

Iomega makes some nice FW enclosures. Just be aware, they have a couple of models that have a plastic body. They are no good - get too hot and don't perform well. The metal ones are excellent though.

But if you can't find that, there might be another (even better) solution. Does your MBP have an ExpressCard slot? If so, get an ExpressCard eSATA controller. I have a 2-port one that works a treat. I use these enclosures. They're OEM and I've seen them sold under many different brand names, so you might well get them in S.A. They are made of metal, so they allow the drive to run cool, they can take both IDE and SATA drives, and allow you to use either USB or eSATA. Performance is as good as I've seen from any 2.5" drive. They come (at least from Maplin) with a USB power cable, and a pouch to store them in. Excellent buy. I have four!

noxibox said:
I wonder if network backup still works to a linux server.
Click to expand...

I don't remember if I used Time Machine to a share on my Linux box under Lion or not. At some point I ran out of space on the Linux box and got a dedicated drive for TM instead. But it's worth a try:

My setup was loosely based on http://www.kremalicious.com/2008/06/ubuntu-as-mac-file-server-and-time-machine-volume/ but I'm running Debian and I already had a fairly elaborate setup, so I made a few changes.

The one tip I'll give you, is I found impossible to make the sparse image directly on the network drive. I had to make it locally, then copy it over. It's not ideal, I would much rather share space on the Linux filesystem, but it seems TM uses a sparse image regardless.
 
Get a USB and limp for while then get a Raspberry Pi as a server. I've used several FW enclosures - got them all from Sybaritic - and the speed is way way better. If have a POS yesteryear obsolete PC lying around, you can also build a little server from that. I now that iomega also used to make self-contained network drives maybe you could find one of those.
 
Personally I'd get a fw800 enclosure and use superduper to do regular backups. FW800 is so much better suited for this sort of thing it's not funny.
 
Unfortunately, my FW800 enclosures were the two (identical) Iomegas that sucked. Still faster than USB2, but definitely doesn't measure up to any of my FW400 enclosures. I guess that was a bum model...
 
Seems like it works. I'll perform a full Time Machine backup later to test it properly.
 
I won't buy a another USB drive.

Firewire is so much better. USB does the job, but FW gets it done faster and without so much resources.
 
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