Time Capsule: The first few hours--is it worth it?

A lot has happened since I posted my first entry of opening my Time Capsule. I would like to report on what all has gone with it since then. After I got everything setup with the network, I wanted to start using Time Machine with it. My first thought was wondering if I could transfer my pre-existing Time Machine data that I have been backing up since Leopard came out, onto the new drive. After a quick Google search, I did not really find anything useful.

In the Time Machine preferences, I went ahead and clicked "Change Disk..." to change it to use Time Capsule from this point forth. What this does, is it makes does that all too painful initial data dump of everything. I forgot what a chore this is time-wise. Luckily, you can do other things while it quietly chugs away at passing my precious data across the network. Something to note about this initial dump...DO NOT INTERRUPT IT! I found this out by accident. I was changing a few network settings in the Time Capsule airport stuff, and clicked "Apply"--all of the sudden I received a message saying that a network drive had been unplugged. Yep, the router started as well as the entire Time Capsule. Therefore, the initial dump stopped.

I thought, not a big deal, I will just restart it once it is back up. So I did. And it seemed to connect until about 20 minutes later, I checked the progress and it was only 25KB along!!! What?!!?! I had seen this problem once before when attempting to backup my MacBook over the network when I first tried out Time Machine. With that, I recalled that if I dumped the initial drive image that had been created on the Time Machine drive, and started it back up, it would start again without a hitch. I did this, and sure enough it began backing up again. However, this time did not go as smoothly either as I did not learn from my last lesson and accidentally restarted my router again! This time during my G5 desktop backup and my MacBook.

I started from scratch on the drive and this time just started my MacBook. I will let my G5 start when it is ready at 11:30pm tonight.

Airport

As for the Airport part of the Time Capsule, I like it much better than my previous Buffalo Turbo G AirStation router (namely due to the native OS X interface known as the Airport Utility). I am familiar with this utility as I have owned an Airport Express for many years as a wireless audio distributor. But now that I have replaced my network with a real Airport Extreme (which I have wanted for a while now) I get to reap the benefits of what I hope to be a great router. Don't get me wrong, the Buffalo is great and I highly recommend that brand to anyone in the market. I have tried every consumer brand out there and nothing worked as great, and had as many useful features, with a great web interface, as this Buffalo router.

Anyway, it has a very easy to use interface as you can see from some of the images below:

It supports a lot of the standard stuff like port mapping. But because it is the Airport Extreme, you can also hook up a printer to make it a network printer, or another drive (USB) to add more storage that is network accessible. However, what you cannot do is add a second drive and add to your existing TIme Machine storage. You can only select one drive that Time Machine will work with.

Other than that, the device seems well built. We will see how it performs over the long haul and as I start using it on an everyday basis. I will try to keep you all updated on it.