Backup disk for iMac

Elric

Elric

Elric

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I've recently bought a refurbished iMac 27" Core i3 for dabbling with and have plugged in one of my 320GB WD Passport USB2 drives in to enable Time Machine. I'm looking for something that will give me a longer backup cycle and would like to make use of the Firewire connector where possible. Is that Time Capsule thingy worth a look?


Also, what about USB ports, I'm finding that just four seems to be a bit of a limitation. Granted, with a change to firewire for Backup disk, that will free up one, but what does eveyone do for additional ports?


Options on a self labelled forum thread please.
 
If you want more USB ports just get a powered hub, you can get them relatively cheap or more expensive if you want the 'Apple look'

As for longer term backups, I've used SuperDuper in the past, takes a full image of the computer to external HDD. A Time Capsule as far as I'm aware is just a box that can be used to provide a wireless/network backup using Time Machine, or just a wireless HDD.
 
Time Capsule is more than just a WiFi HDD, it's a fully-featured Gigabit router with dual-band 802.11n wireless and 4 Ethernet ports. It also has a USB port to connect any number of external hard drives or printers to it for sharing also.
 
They run ridiculously hot when you're doing the first initial backup or wiping the drive. Mine is the 1TB version. I'd hate to be using the 2TB version and have to run a zero wipe for even longer at those temperatures. They are prone to failing a lot. They also appear to be one of Apples most complained about products judging by feedback on their site and across the internet. I fully expect mine to fail at some point. I suspect it will be the drive that goes, which should be simple enough for myself to fix. I'm hoping it's not the PSU.

If all you need is something for backing up, I would just get a drive caddy and an internal drive. It might not look as pretty, but at least it won't be subjected to the temperatures that they can get to.
 
I'm trying to avoid taking the iMac apart to fit another disk in, so, ideally it's either a fire wire disk or a NAS of some sort.
 
It won't strictly be for backup, but I'm either going to use the firewire 4 bay Drobo, or connect a Synology DS411J via ethernet (I get my interwebz wirelessly, so I just have to faff with some of the settings apparently to use both Airport and the physical port at the same time). A two bay (one for backup, one for backing that up) may be more suitable for you? Both companies products have Time Machine capability.

As for inputs, using a Mac Mini, I have one USB taken up by my iPhone dock, and one taken by a powered USB hub, which has a 1TB Seagate external drive attached (which is what I'm going to replace w/one of those two above options) and the inductive charger pad for my mouse. An inductive charger for the keyboard/trackpad will be incoming too. My monitor has 2 usb inputs, one of which I will shortly be using for a bias lighting kit. I use the digital-out function of the headphone port via a minijack-to-optical toslink cable to connect to an external DAC, which feeds some speakers, so that frees up a port, rather than using a USB DAC.
 
The Synology option looks nice but I've also just had a scour and found that WHS 2011 support Mac clients, so I might slap that on a box and try that option out.
 
WHS2011 seems better for the mac than WHSv1 was but hilariously it's Time Machine support is non functional in the RTM. There's been some big guides on manually creating the sparsebundle and copying it to a share and enabling SMB shares for Time Machine (which we've been able to do for years anyway) but apparently we are waiting on an official Addin from MS to enable it properly.
 
I've just had a look at WHS2011 and it feels pretty lightweight and thin compared to the previous WHS setup. I'm going to have a sniff at SS2008R2 and see if there's anything there for me.
 
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