Mossberg reviews Apple’s Time Capsule: Money well spent for users of Time Machine on Mac notebooks

Apple Online StoreApple’s Mac OS X Leopard “includes a feature called Time Machine that automatically and continuously backs up a Macintosh computer’s entire hard disk, without requiring the user to do any tedious setup or have any technical knowledge,” Walt Mossberg reports for The Wall Street Journal.

“Time Machine is a key selling point for Leopard and the Mac. It is more complete, and yet simpler, than the built-in backup feature in Vista Home Premium, the most popular home version of Windows,” Mossberg reports. Apple’s new Time Capsule “is a $299 stand-alone networked gadget that packs both a giant hard disk and a speedy Wi-Fi wireless router into one slender case. It just plugs into your existing home network, and any laptop within wireless range can connect to it. It can back up multiple computers.”

“Time Capsule is designed to seamlessly work with Leopard’s Time Machine. But it can also be used as a wireless Internet connection, and/or a remote hard drive, for manually storing and retrieving files by Windows PCs running either Vista or Windows XP, or by Macs running Apple’s older Tiger operating system. And you can also use it with certain other backup programs, such as the ones built into Windows XP or Tiger,” Mossberg reports.

“In my tests, Time Capsule performed perfectly with Time Machine. It also was easily recognized by several of my Windows machines running Vista and Windows XP. On all of these machines, I was able to speedily access the Internet via Time Capsule. Time Capsule can be set up to either replace or supplement your existing Wi-Fi router,” Mossberg reports. “All the machines, even the Windows ones, also could recognize the Time Capsule as a remote hard disk, and save files to it and retrieve files from it.”

“If you use Time Machine on a Mac laptop, then Time Capsule’s $299 price is money well spent,” Mossberg reports.

Walt Mossberg reviews Apple’s Time Capsule:

Read the full review here.

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