[X4U] Pros and Cons of Time Capsule?

[B. Kuestner]

The wireless backup via Time Capsule is a bonus. But Time Machine has  
its downsides.

The one that bothers me the most is that on my laptop I have FileVault  
turned on. Time Machine will only backup my home, if I log out while  
the backup drive is connected. Ouch! I rarely ever log out. I just  
open and close my laptop.

Also, the Time Machine backup is still encrypted like the FileVault  
home directory is. Some users might appreciate that. But whereas I see  
a realistic chance of losing my laptop and want my data to be safe, I  
see a smaller chance of somebody stealing data from my backup drive at  
home. So my preference here is to use unencrypted backups. This makes  
the backup more reliable, there's no tax on the CPU, and it saves a  
lot of disk space, because files are backed up individually, whereas  
the smalles piece of a FileVault backup is an  8 MB "band", the slices  
of which the encrypted disk image is made in Leopard.

Others have mentioned that Time Machine does not create bootable  
backups.

And I find the way it organizes archives intransparent in that you  
cannot see easily, which file was updated when. You always see a full  
disk. This approach does have its advantages, I know. But it is less  
transparent.

The problem with backups these days is that scanning our huge drives  
is taking very, very long, even if there is little or even nothing to  
copy. And this I like about Time Machine, that it is very clever about  
how it determines what to backup.

To solve my problems I found Synk.
- Synk backs up on a file basis of any user that is logged in, even if  
that user has FileVault turned on. (Of course, if the user isn't  
logged it, then the data are encrypted and Synk can only backup the  
whole FileVault.) This covers the first two points.
- Synk creates bootable backups
- Starting with version 6, Synk is also very smart about its scanning.  
It's not as quick as Time Machine. But whether the scan takes one  
minute of three minutes is not as important to me as long as it  
doesn't take 30 minutes.

So, long story short, try using Time Capsule as a network drive and  
then backup to it via Synk.

By the way, I have also found the Synk support very supportive to my  
questions and suggestions.

Björn