Time Capsule offers wireless backup for Macs

February 10, 2008 at 12:00a.m.

Back in August of 2006, I reported on Apple’s upcoming OS X 10.5 or “Leopard” operating system and specifically wrote about its Time Machine backup feature. Time Machine automatically backs up everything on your hard drive. When I say automatically, that means it backs up everything without you having to do anything at all. All you have to do is to plug in or assign a connected hard drive to be used as the receptacle into which all the backing up will be contained.

At the recent Macworld convention, Apple introduced the Time Capsule. This is a hard drive that’s specifically tailored to work with Time Machine. So what makes this different from any other hard drive you could connect? The difference is that the connection is wireless.

The Time Capsule will be available in either a 500 gigabyte or a 1 terabyte capacity (That’s 1,000 gigabytes). Apple has made it pretty easy to setup as well as use. According to Apple, you just set Time Capsule to be the designated backup drive for Time Machine, and that’s pretty much all you have to do.

Time Capsule uses the faster 802.11n wireless standard, which is pretty fast when it comes to wireless data transmissions. But it’s still a lot slower than a directly wired connection such as Ethernet gigabit. But with that in mind, you can still hook up Time Capsule with a wired connection and leave the wireless for your other Macs that may be in other nearby rooms. That’s right, the Time Capsule can provide backup for multiple Macintosh computers at the same time.

With Time Capsule, you don’t have to have a separate hard drive connected to every computer. After all, external hard drives can still be fairly costly. Time Capsule offers an alternative, effective solution that lets you provide an automated backup system for every Mac in the house.

In addition to being a wireless hard drive, the Time Capsule is also an Airport Extreme Base Station. Using the USB port, you can set up most any printer for sharing so that any Mac and PC in the house can use it to print via Apple’s Bonjour networking technology.

Because the Time Capsule will mount as a wireless hard drive, you can also use it with Windows XP and Vista as an external hard drive, but its main function is to act as a wireless backup storage device that works seamlessly with Leopard’s Time Machine.

As of this column, Apple is taking orders for Time Capsule at its online store and will be shipping them in February. The 500 GB model sells for $299, the 1 TB for $499.

X Craig Crossman is a national newspaper columnist writing about computers and technology. For more information, visit his Web site at www.computeramerica.com.