So back in June I purchased a Time Capsule from Apple, a one-terabyte wireless hard drive. It’s supposed to make backups painless, happening in the background over the network. Initially I had a lot of trouble getting it to work with my wireless network, having to hard-reset it so many times I eventually recommended "don’t buy it". Sometime in September Apple updated the firmware, and I recommended that it was worth trying out.
I didn’t follow up with any further recommendations because for a while, it just stopped working again. Well, this time it was not the Time Capsule’s fault: the wireless network it was connected to was having difficulties. These were orthogonal to the earlier problems, in which the Time Capsule couldn’t even see the network no matter what I did; this time, after restarting the wireless router, the Time Capsule has been working swimmingly.
So, really, now you can get yourself a Time Capsule. Seriously. It’s already saved my butt more than once, having files backed up every hour that my laptop is on my home network; I’ve already used the Time Capsule to recover earlier versions of a variety of files, rather than recreate them. (I am obsessive-compulsive about saving many versions of a file, but having it happen automatically is even better than me manually having to remember to save a file with a new version number hanging off the back end – not that I’ve stopped doing that.)
-the Centaur
