Now Apple expands time
Twice the Capsule for your money
SaaS data loss: The problem you didn’t know you had
Apple has quietly doubled the capacity of its Time Capsule wireless-link backup disk appliance, from one to two terabytes.
Time Capsule is a networked hard drive, a 7200rpm SATA drive, in a typically Apple-style minimalistic curved white box, along with a dual-band - 2.4GHz and 5GHz - 802.11n Wi-Fi base station, which also supports 802.11a, b, and g. It works with the Time Machine continuous backup facility included with Mac OS X Leopard, and can back-up a group of Macs. It can also be used as a Wi-Fi base station for both Macs and Windows XP and Vista PCs with Apple's AirPort software, and as a wireless network-access storage (NAS) facility, again by both PCs and Macs.
Apple last updated Time Capsule in March when it provided the option to operate both wireless bands simultaneously. It also added the ability to run a second, guest wireless network alongside the main one. Guests only get access through Wi-Fi to the Internet and not to any computing, printing or storage resources available to users of the main wireless network.
The new 2TB model costs $499.00 (£379) and the 1TB one $299 (£229). In March the 1TBGB version cost $499, so now you get twice as much capacity for your money, which has to be good news. The old 500GB model is no longer listed but apparently available for $199.00 in the US as a clearance or refurbished item.
El Reg has not heard any indication that Apple might add multi-drive support to Time Capsule, internal that is and not the existing USB-connect external drive facility, and so pave the way for RAID protection of its stored data.
Apple UK sells WD's 4TB My Book Studio II dual external drive in its stores though, which needs a wired and not wireless connection. The price is £449.95 ($824.42). ®
COMMENTS
RAID != backup
If you drop your little RAID box, or it gets fried from a mains surge because that cheap "surge protector" you bought doesn't protect like it should, or you're unlucky and a second drive dies before you get around to swapping out the one you should have, or you delete an important file...
Then you realise that RAID isn't backup. It's a live duplicate of your data - and it's stored right next to the data itself.
RAID
@fifi agreed that its not more resilient and I don't own a time capsule, however I use timemachine on a firewire hd with my mbp and its proved to be a lifesaver on more than one occasion when I've either accidentally deleted some work or needed to roll back and it wasn't in vcs.
Having some form of backup is better than none, although raid is obviously far far better.
@FiFi
Err, well the main point of it is that it's a backup.... if you're not backing up at the moment, you have precisely no redundancy, if you backup to a TM, you have a complete backup. It's unlikely (but possible and statistically little different) that both devices would fail at once... however, even with RAID both discs in that could fail at the same time - again, somewhat unlikely but still entirely possible.
For me it's great and as above, hasn't missed a beat at all.
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Top 10 SIEM implementer’s checklist
Steps to Take Before Choosing a Business Continuity Partner
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
