[X4U] Pros and Cons of Time Capsule?

[John Baltutis]

>
> It's time to replace my aging 80Gb USB1 and 60Gb Firewire backup
> drives with something a bit bigger, say a 1Tb drive. Right now my
> backups consist of dragging important files to the USB and FW drives
> and using Backup along with my iDisk for my personal data and
> settings. I'd like to automate the backup process using something
> like Time Machine. I like the fact that  Time Capsule is from Apple
> but is it really worth looking at or am I better off purchasing
> another brand of drive? Right now I'm backing up the 250Gb HD on my
> iMac but I'm looking into getting a MacBook for my wife that would
> need to be backed up as well. What are the pros and cons of Time
> Capsule?

A couple of things to ponder. Time Machine's backup isn't bootable (but neither
were anything else you were doing) and is only verifiable when restored.Get a
large, bootable, ext FireWire HD, and partition it into at least four parts.
Two small ones for bootable backups/clones, using Carbon Copy Cloner or
SuperDuper!, and two large ones for Time Machine backups (whether or not both
machines can access separate partitions of the same ext HD is left as an
exercise). I'd get two HDs, one for each machine, with two partitions. The
beauty of having a bootable backup/clone is that you can immediately verify
that it does what it's intended to do. Personally, i have no use for Time
Machine stuff. My multiple, bootable clones are kept up to date.