My trip through Time Capsule Hell leads to a different backup approach

My trip through Time Capsule Hell leads to a different backup approach:

 

I bought a one terabyte Time Capsule shortly after it hit the market, along with an external 1.5TB drive. I use the Time Capsule’s internal drive to back up two smaller capacity Macs, while the external disk backs up my two larger capacity Macs.

 

Working with Time Machine in Leopard or Snow Leopard, the Time Capsule updates its backups every hour. This makes perfect sense if you’re just dealing with one Mac wired into the Time Capsule, since it really doesn’t slow anything down. But if you are using it to wirelessly back up multiple Macs, hourly backups slow everything down to a crawl.

 

When Time Machines first came out, I bought two, one for myself, one for my mom. I’m very happy (so far) with the Time Machine with my mom, and she seems to be the appropriate use case for this product: fairly light duty user that doesn’t generate a lot of data and has modest backup/recovery needs. It’s worked wonderfully, and the couple of times I’ve had to hook in remotely and recover files for her, it’s done the job well.

My personal experience wasn’t quite so successful. I don’t like the Time Capsule in a multi-mac environment because it doesn’t seem to do well as the different macs need access to disk space; if one mac allocates disk into its backup, there seems to be no way to recover that data for use by a different mac. That means one mac could find itself with a four month set of backups and another with two weeks (as happened with us), and no way to balance that out. That seems to be a really basic flaw, that there’s now way for the system to tell time capsule to garbage collect disk out of one time capsule dataset and shift it to another that needs it more.

A bigger flaw, however, came when Laurie lost a hard disk. First thing I did was clone the Time Capsule data onto anotehr disk, not only to give me a redundant copy (“just in case!”) but because I wanted to plus that disk into the computer directly to do the restore so I didn’t have to slog it all across the much slower network. Which I couldn’t make work.

I ended up dragging out a long ethernet and wiring up a temporary physical network and doing the restore across that — which took bloody forever. The backup worked flawlessly, and the restore came back fine, but the process of restoring all of that data over the network was painful and caused a long delay, even over physical ethernet to avoid the slower WIFI/wireless. Too painful for my tastes, and there were just too many compromises, so I retired the Time Capsule as a backup device and went to a new backup system that depends on directly connected disks and a combination of superduper as my primary backup and Time Machine as the backup I use in ccase I need to restore an individual file. I don’t like Time Machine as a primary backup  for systems with heavy data requirements (i.e. anyone doing photography, video, audio or any other large data files). I’ve written about backups a number of times, and you can see more details on what I do by looking here, here, here,  and here.  And yes, one of these days, I’l consolidate all of that into an ebook and publish it in a single document that’s easy to keep updated…

But overall, I think if you fit the presumed use case for Time Capsule, it’s okay. But for many of us, our data needs stress it and I don’t want to depend on it as my primary backup in those cases. Time Machine on a directly-wired disk is better, but still, I think there are better options. It is a good way to create a set of backups to do individual file recovery, but I’d rather use a different backup setup for ercovering of a failed disk (and so I do…)

 

 

 

 

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  • Ka6250

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