If you have an apple Time Capsule please read...

[HairyMaclary]

Just thought I'd share what's happened to us so you can all avoid it!

Our time capsule just stopped last week, no warning - the power died. Apparently this is a known problem, at, or even before, 18 months old the power connection just fails. Obviously this is out of warranty so we rang Apple to find out that we could take it in for a replacement (which appears to be them acknowledging that this is a familiar problem to them). However - we have used this as a back up and foolishly have all our photos on there - and only there. This includes all the photos from the birth of our children, especially DS1 who was very premature and has a physical disability as a result and he is starting to want to know what happened to him, for which photos would help a lot!

All our data on the TC is ok, we just can't get to it. If we try to get it by breaking the seal then we invalidate the option to replace it. So we are stuck - either no photos or no Time Capsule and no wireless. Apple will not help at all - they get paid for each sealed unit returned...

I know we were stupid not to have our photos anywhere else (although we think we have some on a DVD - we just can't find it) but the TC is sold as a back up and we didn't expect a sudden complete power loss.
So if you have a time capsule, please back up all your stuff elsewhere while you wait for it to fail...

That's appalling. Really sorry about your photos I don't have one but if I had the cash I would and I would have considered that a decent back up. As probably do thousands of people who have bought them and rely on them. This is when Apple's policy of replacing instead of repair, usually a good one, falls down.

I really hope you can sort it somehow...

Thanks Rockbird, I agree! We are still talking to them about a way to do both.

It's a pain as it's an expensive bit of kit, not to mention the sentimental aspects of it!

I don't know much about computers, but DH has a time capsule which also failed pretty early on. Fortunately he didn't pay for it, he got it as an Apple tester. We love Apple, but this is crap and as you say it is a known fault.

We used to love Apple, not so sure now. DH is on the phone to customer relations at the moment. Not sure he is going to get anywhere though.

A service (FREE) that anyone concerned about backups might be interested in is at www.DriveHQ.com

They offer 1 GB of free online storage (so it is not the place to store heaps of music, but should cope with photos and perhaps the most important home movie clips you want a copy of).

They aim at Windows users and have applications to do scheduled backups and keep an "up-to-date copy" of particular folder(s), but if you have file transfer software you can access the storage and make backups of whatever you want off your Mac.

Incidentally, you should have free file transfer from Terminal, using something like

ftp ftp.drivehq.com

You'd be prompted for your username and password to connect to their server, and can then do file transfers. I don't have space to go into all the FTP commands here, but if anyone is interested, I'll look around for a guide in user friendly, "plain English".

(Unfortunately, when you are using Terminal, you're in a unix style command window, and sometimes commands are a little unusual or terse.)

Ooh thanks for that - it's a bit beyond me but I'll show it to DH who does all the computer stuff in this house! We were thinking of paying for online storage of stuff for security but would prefer not to!

Don't blame you. In a separate thread I suggested that for quantities of data (ie more than the number of machines x 1GB each) it's perhaps good value to consider a USB stick (8 or 16 GB should cope with some home video + documents [letters, accounts] + photos {+ website} ].

Once you go past 16 GB (which is likely to cost up to 25 quid) then 80 quid can buy 1000 GB or even 1500 GB (1 TB or 1.5 TB) external drives.... plenty enough for backups from several machines in a home.

You can get 250 GB and 320 GB external drives, and I suppose if one was to go for something closer to "belt and braces" backups, then you'd have two drives (eg 2x 250 GB) and keep the same data on both, one possibly taken away from home - all depends on how much the content is valued - someone with their own business would perhaps feel keen to have a second or third copy of business accounts 'just in case' and in that position the backup device would be a business expense). For home, a couple of copies are probably enough.

For business...

If you want to go further then the recommended strategies include three copies (Grandfather, Father and Son copies), where you'd make a copy of important files at the start of the month, use a second device the next month and a third the month after... call them A, B, and C. Then, in month 4, you'd re-use 'A' (which had become the oldest copy, the Grandfather) and that becomes the new 'Son'. In month 5, you'd re-use 'B' and the following month, re-use 'C', and carry on like that.

From time to time, you'd need to check the copy can be read (especially if you go for a more elaborate backup scheme - there are tape drives which aren't too expensive, and tapes can hold quantities of data), because you need to have confidence that if the PC hard drive died, you'd be able to get a fairly recent copy of the important files.

The more important the files, the more frequent the backups (an office might save every file which has been changed that day, and after a week, create a full backup). Something to consider separately, really.