Sigh. I really love apple equipment I really do but I have to say these time capsules are a big mistake. There are two huge problems
1. There is no permissions or security. I just accidentally deleted 100gb of photos because there is no way to make a directory read only. Ur either full access of not. If ur really using this to store valuable data fo corporate or home it is just too dangerous becase there is no real backup strategy. Doing an archive takes hours and u only have one copy and u have to do it manually. In my case with four time capsules u forget and u have to have four dedicated drives so your pretty time capsules look ugly.
2. Power supply failure. The oldest time capsules are failing. We have two from mid 2008 and they died with bad supplies Again unless u take regular backups ur toast. Apple will only do unit replacement so there is no way to recover data without ripping the things apart which voids all warranties and is a pain. Again u have to remember to do manual recovery. These things run mercilessly hot because of poor thermal design so I’m sure the rest will fail as time marches on.
So what to do.
A. If u have time capsules stop using the hard drives right away. Use them like expensive airport extremes.
B Buy a backup terabyte drive and archive them right away before they die. These USB drives are now dirt cheap.
C. Get a network attached drive set. Ideally one that has raid so u get data redundency, permissions on a folder basis so u won’t deleted data and ideally a trash can like scheme so a single delete doesn’t wipe out everything, gigabit Ethernet interface for those media files and with todays modern machines u need 4tb at least IMHO. Darrell recommends the drobo. I need to investigate.
