Dear Friends,
This week it’s Ed writing for Don, who was last seen wandering into a mysterious crop circle, looking up into a strange light flooding the sky. He’s supposed to be back next week—we’ll see.
On Thursday Apple introduced an new version of its neato Time Capsule, now with two terabytes of storage. Time Capsule is both a wireless backup device along with a built-in Airport Extreme wireless router. It works beautifully with Time Machine, Apple’s automatic backup program, which is included with the Leopard operating system. Two terabytes of storage is pretty huge, certainly enough for most households and even many small businesses. Kali writes more about this update below.
I welcome innovative programs like Time Machine and devices like Time Capsule that streamline and automate computer backup. Too few people realize that all the precious data on their computer is stored on a delicate stack of magnetic platters spinning thousands of times per minute. Unfortunately, it’s a fact of modern life (and all mechanical devices) that a computer’s hard drive will eventually fail. In most cases when that happens, all data is either permanently lost or very, very expensive to recover. Maintaining a solid backup regime can make hard drive failure an annoyance rather than a crisis.
In addition to using Time Machine with a Time Capsule, I’ve been testing a few of the online data storage plans, including Mozy.com, iDrive.com, and Carbonite.com. I’ll review these in a future Kibbles and Bytes article.