APC Magazine: Apple Time Capsule is world’s easiest backup system

“It’s hard to know where to categorise Apple’s Time Capsule. It combines a 3-port gigabit router, USB file and print server, dual-band wireless access point and 1TB NAS appliance. For many home users, the Time Capsule will be the only device they’ll need to manage their connectivity and shared data storage. If you’re trying to manage costs, there’s also a 500GB versio,” Anthony Caruana reports for APC Magazine.

“The Time Capsule is primarily designed for Mac users wanting to take advantage of Time Machine, OS X Leopard’s fully automatic backup system. However, Windows users can access the hard disk within the Time Capsule just like any other NAS although they will need to install Apple’s [free] Bonjour software to do this,” Caruana reports.

MacDailyNews Note: More info and download link for Bonjour for Windows here.

Caruana continues, “The first backup to the Time Capsule, from our MacBook Pro over 802.11n wireless, took 7.5 hours. This covered 56GB of data. Users with more data on their hard drive — e.g. the 250GB on the latest MacBook Pros — will need to plug their Mac directly into the Time Capsule using an Ethernet cable, otherwise, the backup will take several days (in fact, in APC testing, backing up 250GB over gigabit ethernet still took 9 hours.)”

Caruana reports, “On the Windows side of things, after installing Bonjour, life was very simple. When our test system, a Toshiba Portege R500, booted up, we were prompted to connect to the Time Capsule. After accepting the connection, we launched Windows Explorer. The hard disk in the Time Capsule appeared as a mapped drive that we could copy files to it just like any attached storage.”

Caruana reports, “Many Mac users boast that their systems “just work” – the Time Capsule, in our testing delivered that experience.”

Full review here.