Apple Time Capsule review

Apple Time Capsule Review

Reviewed by: Rich Brown

Reviewed on: 5 March 2008

Mac users can use the Time Capsule's hard drive for basic storage as well, but they also get more benefit from Time Capsule than the Windows crowd, due to its interface with Leopard's Time Machine feature. Time Machine lets you set automated backups from the Macs on your network directly to the Time Capsule. It took about two hours to back up a relatively sparse 21GB of data on a MacBook laptop over a wired Gigabit connection to the Time Capsule.

Apple has also preset Time Capsule to perform several backups a day for the first week you set it up, several backups a week after the first day and then throughout each month until you run out of drive space. Each backup only saves the information that's changed, so you don't have to do the complete multi-gigabyte data transfer every time. You can also tell Time Machine to back up manually whenever you want.

Features
This brings us to the Time Capsule's USB port. The AirPort Extreme Base Station had one as well, so much of the functionality is the same. The idea is that you can plug pretty much any networkable USB device into the Time Capsule and share it across your network. It can also accept a USB hub if you want to attach multiple devices.

We successfully added a USB flash drive and a USB hard drive, each of which created another distinct drive volume on our network. Apple offers no RAID capability with the Time Capsule -- unlike the old Asus router-storage combo product -- so it can't mirror added drives or map them into a contiguous volume. Mirroring a drive already set to backup might be excessive, but it would be useful to create a single volume out of multiple drives.

In addition to adding storage, Apple also touts the USB ports for adding printers to your network. We were able to add a Canon Pixma ip2600 inkjet printer with no trouble, even over a powered USB hub that also had a hard drive connected to it. All of the various Mac and Windows-based systems on the Time Capsule's network were able to print to it. We also installed a Wi-Fi-enabled Lexmark X7550 to the Time Capsule's network wirelessly.

The Time Capsule is not a print server, so if you send a job to the printer while it's printing from another system, you'll simply get an error message, instead of the Time Capsule adding the new job to a queue. That's to be expected, although it's still frustrating, as Apple makes a point to advertise the Time Capsule's suitability for network printing.

You should also not consider the Time Capsule as a one-stop shop for your iTunes library across various systems, nor should you expect it to work with an Apple TV. In other words, a completely centralised Apple home media network is still out of reach. We were able to get an Apple TV onto the Time Capsule's wireless signal, but it wouldn't find any of the iTunes libraries.

One thing we feared about the Time Capsule when we first heard of it is that because it's essentially a closed box, if the hard drive or the router fails, you end up losing both. It's been shown that you can peel off the Time Capsule's rubbery bottom and remove the hard drive yourself, but Apple confirmed for us that even if you were to do that, you couldn't treat the Time Capsule as a standalone router, as the hard drive hosts vital data on it for the networking functionality as well.

That's another shortcoming, although Apple assured us that the Time Capsule's "server grade" Hitachi Deskstar hard drive would last a lot longer than the typical desktop or laptop drive.