Apple Time Capsule MB996LL/A 2TB (SIM Dualband) Review

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(More customer reviews)This product is basically three products: an airport extreme wireless router, a networked drive, and finally, with Leopard, a networked backup system. Overall, it's a very good product, but there are some serious limitation one should be aware of.
As a router, it is fantastic. Typical Apple ease of use, with all configuration done by a very intuitive GUI application.
Unfortunately, it's not a great network drive. The drive appears to be internally connected using a very slow USB connection. You will find that even with a computer connected via Gb/s ethernet, transfer speeds will be limited to around 5-6 MB/s, tops. If you connect two Macs via fast ethernet, you can often get over 40 MB/s transfer speeds, so this is a rather large disappointment, especially for a device which will be getting a lot of use if you use Time Machine.
Time Machine is great in theory, and can act as a form of automatic version control, but it has a few issues. First, it is a file-based differential backup. That means, for example, that if even a single bit of a 1 GB file is changed, the ENTIRE file gets backed up. Not only does this take a lot of time, it quickly depletes your backup drive because the same data is added to the disk repeatedly. To get around this, you have to explicitly exclude backing up large files that are often changed. Good candidates for exclusion are Mail and iDisk caches, as well as virtual machine disk images.
There have also been numerous reports of Time Machine backups being susceptible to corruption. I've experienced this once, myself, after a backup was canceled, so I can vouch that it happens. However, the problems can often be fixed by deleting the last backup. The next backup will take a long time as the computer must scan the full disk again, but the backups then continue on normally after that. I have yet to have Time Machine get my backups into a state where they can't be fixed by this method.
Time Machine backups have their place, and come in very handy to recover accidentally deleted files. However, they should only be considered part of a larger backup scheme. They probably shouldn't be trusted for a full recovery, and won't be of any help if your computer's drive completely fails, anyway. (How are you going to run Time Machine if you can't boot your computer? EDIT: As pointed out by the commenter, if your drive fails completely, you can still reinstall the system from the DVD and then run the Transfer Assistant to recover your files from the Time Capsule. It's not as good as a complete backup, as Transfer Assistant is notorious for breaking applications, but you won't lose your work.) As such, you should image your entire drive regularly, in addition to using Time Machine.

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