Time Capsule: Off To A Roaring Start

I love the one I have here in my house. It's incredibly simple.

I also bought a second one and colocated it with macminicolo.net so I could backup from my laptop while I'm on the road. Never can have too much security with backups.

I guess it is less than OK By far the worst Apple product. The internet stops responding everytime the internal drive starts up and takes 1 minute or more to finish. The printer looses conectivity. I had the Airport extreme and loved it. I sold it after buying this product. I plan on throwing this out the window and buying another Airport extreme. The time capsule is horrible. The worst part is that It loses internet every 30 minutes or so

I want Time Machine on the PC under windows XP.
I love Time Capsule for my Macs. Trying to auto backup PCs is a total pain. Unfortunately I need a few PCs to run CAD/CAM programs.

Love my Time Capsules, They work great in my Network here at ELVISoutlet.com. Backup was so easy to set up, & wireless is so FAR too. Thank You Apple

Love my Time capsule it has worked flawlessly so far. It isn't as fast as backing up to wired drive but speedy non the less.

I to have set it up so I can back-up on the road. And so far so good.

My NetGear Router worked fine for about a year. When it died, they sent a new one, but it died too. Their tech support sucks. Then I went to the Apple store to discuss options. I bought Time Capsule and the tech support knew how to set it up perfectly. Once again, I was sold on Apple because it just works.

Still, I have some of the same issues with initial connection of my laptop. I got in the habit of turning off airport, waiting a few seconds, then connecting to airport and it works perfectly. Too bad I have to do that to make it work. Also, the range is not as good as the NetGear.

I've had my 1TB time capsule for about a month now. It works as advertised and like all Apple products, it was very easy to setup. The device integrates well with Leopard's Time Machine feature. Wireless backups/restores are the way to go.

Mine is working great. Internet has never dropped even with two computers doing wireless backups at the same time. I tried two non-apple Wireless-N routers before buying it and they were a pain to install and configure and the wireless connection was slower. Time capsule just works!

I am not buying the Time Capsule idea. I was able to get my Airport Express Base Station with a Seagate 500GB HDD ($99), My backups on Mac & Windows are working great.

Sounds like "Michael's" experience is an anomoly.

Howard, that's exactly what the Time Capsule is for; run your Windows operating system on your mac using Bootcamp/VMWare/Parallels and backup both your Mac OS X and Windows using Time Capsule. Cheers

Great product. I have had no problem whatsoever with my new Time Capsule. It does its job in the background and does not interfere with my internet connection or any other computer based process. Great product that is transparent to the user.

I LOVE my Time Capsule. Seamless operation for my 2 Macbook Pros as well as my older G5s. Not a hiccup and I bought it the first day it shipped. Way to go Apple!!
I suspect the issues the previous poster had are a product of user error.

I find the marketing of Time Capsule to be a bit confusing. Apple says it works with PCs. Its wireless network works with PC and print server but not the wireless back up. That is the whole point of the product. Be advised that you need the latest and greatest Mac OS with the Time Capsule software for full functionality. On the very positive side it has a great price point and the build quality is very good, the wireless works well so far easy to set up. Apple keep up the good work.

Andy Y

Michael, your decision to sell your Airport Extreme before fully testing your Time Capsule and your new plan to toss out the Time Capsule for a new Airport Extreme each sound like knee-jerk reactions.

Clearly something is wrong with your Time Capsule, and it could be the unit, the setup or your network. Do yourself a favor and take a couple of weeks spending some time troubleshooting this before giving up on the Time Capsule. Most reports I've read across the Internet indicate that Apple customers are having good experiences with the Time Capsule. Could it be an 802.11g/n issue? Do you have a hard-wired Ethernet backbone and does this happen on the wire portion of the network? Many questions and answers can be pursued to try and resolve this issue...

Michael,
try setting your wireless settings to narrowband I had the same problem and it defaults with a wide area signal that's why you keep losing Internet every 30 minutes mine had the same problem until I looked under advanced wireless settings and noticed it had wide

Michael,

There is a simple reason for the 30min internet drop offs. I don't remember the exact location but it's as simple as turning one feature off.

Basically (I think it's named IPV something). Depending on your ISP the router is trying to delegate the IP number set by your ISP. When this happens it's like they have a fight and the router has to walk away for a second. Thus leaving you with no internet connection.

I will find the exact instructions and repost them here a little later. I hope this will help you with your situation.

I have had Time Capsule since it came on the market. It is indeed an easy and automatic backup facility. However... Mine has stopped responding a number of times, forcing me to set everything up anew and losing the backed up data in the process. It slows down network traffic during backup (which occurs every hour for a long time if you're working and generating data). More often than not I maually stop the backup as soon as I see it's running. Now this can not be what is supposed to happen.

Connection to the TC is frequently lost altogether and I am very happy to have another WLAN AP installed.

What use is a backup that is not reliable?

Change requests... I want to be able to:
1 set backup frequency;
2 have a QoS option to stop TC from hogging network capacity
3 use the disk for other purposes

We had some issues setting it up, but Apple tech support walked me through it fine. I noticed that you do lose internet when the unit starts its backup, but only briefly, nevertheless this is an annoying feature. On the other hand we have gone years in our small business with much more annoying backup procedures and Time Capsule has given us peace of mind. I think Apple did us all a service by creating this product to protect our valuable assets with a minimum of hassle and expense. Its by far the best back up system we have ever used for this important chore.

The Time Capsule is a precise, clean and efficient solution for those of us concerned about backing up family photos, music and financial docs. It is a serious player and worked seamlessly with my established wireless network. We have one base, Time Capsule, 1 relay and 2 remotes as well as a network printer.

We have NOT had the issues Michael references, and I suggest you try setting up the network and Time Capsule again, it WILL work.

Apple continues to deliver to consumers what they want. A crisp and easy solution that is turnkey and reliable. Thanks Steve Jobs. (Perhaps Washington DC might want to have you consult on some items...)

I have been using my time capsule for the past 3 weeks now and I absolutely love it. It was easy to setup and I configured it to work on the 802.11n network so I can get the fastest and best connection.

It already has saved me once. I was making changes to my email account in the Mail program and I accidentally deleted one of my mailboxes. Thank goodness I had Time Capsule setup. I just went into time machine and pulled the mailbox back from yesterday. I didn't lose a thing.

This product is the greatest.

All is running fine, now. Had a few startup problems but they seem to be resolved. Be aware of the initial backup time, as is stated in the Apple literature. Restores are easy.

My time machine is working great (as best I can tell). I have not had to recover anything yet which is the real test.
Mine is also a very active router. I think Michael needs to go have his replaced.

Like all the Apple products I've had experience with since switching from a Windows machine three months ago Time Capsule works so well and with so little fuss right out of the box that I tend to forget that it's even there. The only problem was trying to get one. They were going out of the stores as fast as they came in.

I had the Airport Extreme before I bought the Time Capsule. I used the AE to replace a Netgear router connected to my DSL modem, and use the TC with my cable modem. It enabled me to set the TC up as an N-only network and this setup is fabulous. It works seamlessly with my Apple TV and MacBook Air and it's very fast.

I think Michael has a bad internet service

Reply to comment of Micheal
May 14, 2008 05:41 PM

I've had nothing but problems with Time Capsule. Even after several times with the tech. over the phone, I can only access Time Machine about one out of three tries. It usually freezes my computer and I have to boot up again.

My solution: use another hard drive for Time Machine and be happy with the wireless connection. As I'm not the only one with this complaint, I hope Apple will come up with a fix soon.

I like my Time Capsule though it turned out to not meet my expections. I have no complaints about it as an access point or Internet router/firewall, but the network storage isn't sufficiently robust -- though not necessarily Apple's fault.

First, I have a mixed environment of Windows, Linux and OSX. Everything is wired gigabit except for the macs which are primarily wireless.

Time Machine works great and absolutely no complaints there. Our two laptops now have a backup solution and that is a relief.

But using the Time Capsule as a network file share is less than optimal in this environment. At first I intended to replace my old (linux) file server. One motivation was that OSX just didn't seem to work too well with nfs. In particular, it would hang if it went to sleep with an nfs share mounted. No unlocking the system, dead to the world. I figured being an Apple product the Time Machine wouldn't have this problem.

I was wrong, though it *is* much better. However, the Time Capsule only works as a samba/cifs share and either due to that or poor design on Apple's part (I'm inclined to blame samba/cifs) moving large files or doing lots of data transfers hangs the connection. With a terabyte hard drive over 60% full with network shared files this is a problem.

In the end I put a linux-based nfs file server back on the network with unison handling cross-updates between it and the Time Capsule. While not as ideal as having a single file server Windows -- though mostly stable -- is a little finicky using nfs and our macs deal better with lost connections to file shares on the Time Capsule. There is also the side benefit of having *another* copy of the data on separate hardware.

I like the concept of Time Machine and Time Capsule but have a problem with my Western Digital. There was no manual with it and it downloaded my MacBook Pro laptop perfectly...but I have problems... I cannot figure how to correctly shut down time machine by dragging it to Waste Back to eject it since the thing just keeps running all the time and kind of freezes the machine. I wished I would have bought the Apple Machine instead of Western Digital. They tell you to shut it down and not run it 24/7 but it will not allow one to eject it. It states there are programs open but I know that is not true. I wish I could find a manual for the WD 500 gb. model I have so I could get it to work correctly. Concept is brilliant. Execution with WD model is challenging!!!

Time Capsule works perfectly and exactly as advertised. I'd bet money that users experiencing problems with connections have a 2.4 GHz cordless phone to blame!

I had a number of problems when I first set up Time Machine. Apparently, the backup does not work properly if the name you give the time capsule is too long or includes numbers. I spent an hour on the phone with tech support to resolve this issue. I also was constantly getting kicked off my own network. Turns out you need to adjust the wireless channel to 9 for best results. Also learned that if you have a microwave anywhere near your time machine, it will kick you off. Overall a good product. Does anyone know if you can "go back in time" to an earlier version of an application. In the event you have problems with an app after it was upgraded or patches that you installed are messing up the system.

I had major problems setting up Time Capsule even after spending two hours with Apple tech support. All of the computers on my network (iMac desktop and two PCs) could access the Internet, but the iMac could not "see" the other two computers on the network and when I tried to conect to the Time Capsule using the iMac I got a message saying "Connection Failed"--which I think means I would not be able to backup the iMac.

Using a NetGear router, the iMac could share files with the two PCs easily.

Fantastic product. Easy to install and to use. Its great to have a wireless storage devise that also work as a multi-task router (I connect a printer and two phone modems).

The best of all is the software. Nothing in the market like it.
Bravo Apple

I found that the networking is OK, but that I cannot establish a connection with the printer.

I suspect that the printer is not Bonjour compatible. I can add the printer to the list via the USB port, no problem, but although I can establish a print queue for the exact same printer via a Bonjour connection, print job sent via that queue fail to print.

The bottom line: I suspect that if you want to use your printer over a Time Capsule based wireless network, make very sure that it will work correctly in Bonjour.

i just switched after being a system pgmr for 20yrs on mainframes and pc to apple.
but i cantget my linksys what therest of family uses for pc 2.5 ghz o work with my 1 t timemachine 801.11
why?
any geek squad?

Time Capsule works great, but what about the wireless printing problems? Is Apple going to address this issue>

All Time Machine needs is a way to control the backups. It slows my computer down, once every 12 hours would be better. Spotlight also needs help, it's indexing the backup drive which also slows things down.

Enjoying the commentary -- have been holding off on buying a Time Capsule and thinking of various options but sounds like the right set-up to backup my two Macs. For some weird reason my Macs regularly (every 30-60 minutes) are reassigned IP addresses when I am online, which drops the net connection -- don't know if this is a modem or Airport Extreme issue and haven't been able to determine the reason -- and am hoping that I might kill that particular bird with a Time Capsule stone too.

Totally unfinished shit. 15 minutes working and program went into complete stall. Did have to loose electric connection to reset imac.

A joke.

a

DXF wrote: "I'd bet money that users experiencing problems with connections have a 2.4 GHz cordless phone to blame!"

Don't be silly. All laptops and the Time Capsule itself have small, very inefficient antennas. Many of us these days live in high-density housing with a huge number of 2.4GHz signals raising the noise floor. At 9:00 pm at my apartment in San Diego it's not unusual to see 30 or more 802.11 access points.

Pete Sermersheim: shutdown your Mac, unplug the drive, then boot again. You will want to find out what program is accessing the disk drive all the time, but that will let you detach the drive.

Big apple fan and couldn't wait to get Time Capsule. Unfortunately working through set up I somehow managed to disable the internet and for the first time in many years was unable to fix it myself,. Eventually had to pay professional techguys to fix it. First could not, second one did. Now Time Capsule is working but I identify with Michael. The internet is continually stopping and the network has to be rejoined again and again which is getting tiresome. Not the usual plug and play that I expected.

I love my Tim Capsule now, but had problems all originating with my ISP. The modem we had was configured to be something other than bridge mode, which caused a double NAT, which interfered with everything Time Capsule tried to back up. Finally found the impetus to get a better ISP, and no problems since, with both my iMac and the MacBook. So, Michael, check in your console to see if there is a double NAT going on, and it may solve your problems.

I purchased a Time Capsule and was excited at the potential. Well 3 days later, 4 hours on the phone with apple, countless hours on internet forums, and a mastery of the instruction manuel, I was never able to use my capsule, it never worked as advertised, I do not have an extensive knowledge of computers, but my previous experience with apple products has always been simplistic and wonderful. I was expecting the simplicity of an airport express or extreme, too bad too, because it has amazing potential, its just not user friendly for computer illerterates.

Initially worked well. Easy to set up; however, I back up my files to .Mac back-up because it does "hang" for hours. I agree.....it is not a finished product. I'm still a Apple fan...got to give them credit for trying.

I've had my 1TB Time Capsule for about 3 weeks now. It's doing the job and I like the product and the peace of mind that I _finally_ have an automated backup system in place.

I did have a few items that were of interest though.

1) No support for turning-off DHCP on the LAN side if you don't want it in the "Create a new network" configuration (I run my DHCP server on one of my Linux machines)
2) NAT redirection for FTP sessions reports the incoming IP address as the WAN IP address of your Time Capsule and not the IP address of the machine on the Internet connecting to your FTP server
3) Time capsule always wants to be the X.X.X.1 address on your LAN in "Create a new network" mode -- no way to set it to anything else in that mode
4) No support for blocking WAN IP addresses or WAN IP address ranges in the firewall
5) LAN side domain name forced to be ".local" -- no way to change it to something else (I run my own DNS on my LAN to take advantage of some of the "magic" provided by named).
6) To get the best speeds and distances out of the Wireless, set it to "Wireless N only" in the 5GHz spectrum
7) Unable to add devices to the Wireless network while first backup for any machine is taking place

I love my time capsule. Easy to install. No problems printing but I can not use my scan utilities.

I have had my Time Capsule for a few weeks and find it to be very nice and reliable.

I do have one question: My TC is NOT shown as mounted, nor is it shown in my shared resources. It does backup just fine. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Agreed with Ari Mannu. Installation is not as simple as it looks. Doesn't work well with my existing Network 802.11b/g network. Have to disconnect all older devices to backup (initial) my 500 GB HD of iMac and macBook Air using 802.11n network. Even then the whole process took about three days. Painfully slow.

I purchased the TC 1TB model to back up my MAC PRO. It has been running only overnight since the initial install replacing one of my Airport Extreme stations. So far my largest complaint is the back up is very slow! In a ten (10) hour period it has successfully backed up 228GB of the 928GB required. This leads me to wonder how long a restore will take. Also the top of the case run a 117 F / 47.3 C temperature boosting my 12' x14' office ambient temperature a few degrees overnight during this initial back-no biggie.

I will be keeping the TC for other uses such as backing up my Macbook Pros from the road. However, I think a nice Raid 0 1TB FW 800 is a better way to go on the MAC PRO.

Bottom LIne: The Apple Time Capsule works as advertised and is probably a bit better than consumer grade.

I ordered the Time Capsule as an early order pre-sale item before they were available. As an early adopter, I was hit with glitches - internet loss, freezing, printer config dropping, 10 minutes to print a page from the printer (Samsung laser) etc. Then along came an update for the Time Capsule and then one for the imac and - perfection. Suddenly everything has been working great. I had a Linksys WRT54G wireless router that worked quite well before but I had no "N" and the wireless signal was actually weaker from the family room as per the WSP finder app on my macbook pro.

I just wanted to address some of the issues on this page as well - make sure you have the latest updates and have the printer configured properly. It makes all the difference. Also, one main difference between the Time Capsule and the Airport Base w/external HDD I was told is the thru-put speed - USB vs. SATA on wireless, the SATA of the Time Capsule is on less bottleneck so it is potentially faster.

JAMES KISTNER: Does your Linksys support WDS ? If not it can't hook up to another Wifi Station (Apple or other). If they're close together, you may connect them with an Ethernet cable though.

Hope this helps

Nothing but trouble!

Endless hours of trying to no avail.

Checked every possible forum and tried every "fix" but still nothing.

Basic problem is that upon set up, after restart, the TC become invisible to the computers.

I am hoping Apple will do a better job in the future!

Me: latest software, 10.5.2, latest firmware, etc.

Very frustrating!

It all sounds like the greatest of greats, BUT :
I'd prefer Time-Machine to work when I sleep, and for Time-Machine to sleep when I work.
Can anyone tell me how to program a convenient (for me) time-slot for Time-Machine to function without disturbing my work ??
Until I get that info, I'll have to do without, and have currently switched the dammned thing off !
My heartfelt thanks to the wise one who shares his wisdom !
Ragnar2007@free.fr

I am a big Apple proponent. But Time Capsule is nit ready for prime time. I have the 1 T and the internet connection is terrible. Fades in and out even at close range drops printer and Apple TV all the time. Especially bad when backing up.

From what I had read and experienced, Apple has not perfected this Time Machine. Or it's possible that not all machines work the same. I have had numerous problems such as where it would not work wireless and my computer froze in the middle of a backup resulting in serious corruption of many applications.

It is my belief that Apple gets its products out to market way too soon and lets the consumer monitor its problems. Now there's typical corporate strategy for you.

I own many Apple products and all of them are great, except Time Capsule. Mine worked great for about 6 weeks, then all of sudden it stopped recognizing my printer, which requires me to restart the TC. Now I am having issues with the corrution of the back-up file such that the disk image won't mount and will no longer back-up. According to Apple the solution is to delete the .sparsebundle file and start-over from scratch losing my entire back-up history. Some back-up device. This product is definitely not ready for prime-time.

A couple minor glitches setting it up. I recommend plugging it in with network cable for initial backup. And reset the cable modem to pick up new address.

I've had the 500gb model since the beginning of April and it's very good. Occasionally, like every 2 weeks or so, a backup will fail, indicated in the menu bar; just restart the computer and it will start working again.

4/5

I have my 1TB Time Capsule now for one month. And then the backup of my MacBook corrupted. Some message like "please reformat your device asap" appeared.

The main task of this device is to ensure that your data is available in every case. It failed to do this.

In the dedicated forum on Apple Support you find many people having this problem arising after one month of operations.

Apple should sort this out very quick. Otherwise the customer feedback will not that good as you reported.

Best, Andreas!

I bought one for my mother, but it was not as simple as it seemed returned it.

Furthermore, can we get a hard drive with HDMI out and a simple interface. Or my dream an apple computer with a blue ray player and an hdmi out. This would be grand.

I-TV is the begining of a good idea, but it is monopolized by products apple can sell to you. Not impressed.

I understand that this could have to do with pirating issues, but should the consumer be responsible for their actions. Sony is on the right path with a 500gb hard drive with a 200 disc blue ray player, but its quite over the top. Especially at over 3gs.

Apple please come out with a completely interactive, large capacity, high definition, connectivity compatible product.

Hey Chris,

Check out this source of information about Apple.

Dad

Willis,

Try using a Mac Mini as a media center.

AIf this had AirTunes then it would have been perfect.

btw - I wish people would stop saying that "Apple products just work". You sound like fanbois, they don't and I'm a happy Apple convert.

In my few months using them I've had a load of issues mostly with Wi-Fi drop outs. It's been a major pain for a lot of Mac users (fixed in 10.5.3) but also with crashes and hangs.

I have had the Time Capsule since day one. However, over a course of the past month, it has become my worst nightmare. Before I start off, I have several 802.11g/draft n systems, a mix of linux, xp, solaris and osx boxes. My prime objective was to get rid of my file/backup server. I am not huge on torrenting/downloading; however, I do have a huge raw picture data.
That said, my time capsule when setup in a double NAT mode (yes, its a conflict, I know that, but it worked for 2 montbs before that) refuses to mount any HFS+ formatted drives. It reboots when FAT32 formatted drives are accessed (it mounts it correctly on the TC as per the logs) via any wired/wirelessly attached computers.
In my effort to troubleshoot it, I switched from NAT'ing to bridge mode. Once setup in bridge mode, externally attached drives, be it a HFS+/FAT32 - both single partitions, do mount, but after a while of use, Time Capsule disconnects all devices, as if it just crashed (brrr, BSOD days >. My experience with using any attached drives with Time Capsule has resulted in a failure after the 1st month and half of solid use.
It is a great product, but all of these problems have made me re-think about going the Airport Extreme route again.
The guys at the genius bar did the same torubleshooting as I did to conclude the same thing; "errr, we dunno what's wrong with it. Try working with the phone support folks, if you still have a problem, we will swap your unit."
While I am and have been an admirer of Apple products, Time Capsule has been nothing short of a nightmare for me.

I bought a mac book air and a time capsule and brought it back to Malaysia and I have nothing but problems setting it up. I really wish that Apple would set up a store here so that Apple fans are not frustrated. I have also signed up for apple care. When I call them its really a luck of the draw who attends to your problem. Its now over 10 days since I contacted them about setting up my Time Capsule but until today they have not solved the problem. They promise to call me back but there is no call back. I am thoroughly fed up.

I had problems hardwire connecting my old windows pc (Dell) and intermittent connection issues with my iMac. Hours of pain trying to fix.

My brother suggested maybe it was my firmware on my DLS modem. Turned out that my dsl modem was so old that its firmware could not be updated. With new dls modem, I have had no problems with connections.

I have had terrible problems where my computer posts warning after warning saying something like the internet is not responding and will be back on line in approximately one minute. Is this a common problem?