Last week I saw a great deal on an Apple Time Capsule on Buy.com. It was a 500GB version (so not the current one) and refurbished, selling for about 60% off the original price. I’ve wanted one since they came out, and while I do wish for a larger HD, I couldn’t pass on the price, so I bought it.
This afternoon my not-so shiny and new Time Capsule arrived. I was a little taken aback at the appearance of the box and the device, because this is the first Apple product I’ve bought second-hand, and I was so used to the crisp, clean appearance of all of my equipment. It wasn’t in terrible shape by any stretch, but there are scuff marks that won’t go away (no matter how much iKlear I use) and there are already some minor scratch marks. Owell, I’ll have to live with it, especially for the deal I got on it.
Setting it up was a bit of a hassle, primarily because where I live, my internet access is severely restricted and there are rules that impede me from setting things up the way I want (in fact, using a router of any kind at all is against the rules, but owell, it’s not connected to the network and the wireless network is hidden, so no one will know it even exists). My original plan was to connect it to the network and have it broadcast a hidden wireless network for me to use with my two machines (and maybe a few friends when they’re over), but unfortunately the network access agent we use doesn’t work under that senario (although curiously it does work when the machine is connected to the Time Capsule via ethernet and the Time Capsule is not creating a wireless network).
So I had to settle with keeping my internet access limited to one computer at a time via ethernet and then running my Time Capsule as a completely closed, offline wireless network. I’m fine with that for now because I only have to deal with this situation for another three months and because the main reason I wanted a Time Capsule was because of the sharing capabilities.
I’ve been completely neglecting to backup my secondary machine (the iMac) since it became my secondary machine. All the most important documents are already being synched online via DropBox, so there wasn’t an immediate need to worry about it. My MacBook Pro on the other hand has a Time Machine backup running back to last July. But now, with AirPort disks, I can connect my 1TB external to both my MacBook Pro and iMac and run backups for both without having to manually switch the drive between machines. My next effort will be to see if I can hook up a USB router and connect all my external drives to the network (I don’t think it’ll work, but I seem to remember something about this working somewhere, maybe I imagined it).
The built in drive in the Time Capsule is now my master swap drive, storing the larger files that I need to be able to access on both machines (since DropBox maxes out at 2GB). The one problem I’ve encountered so far is that migrating 340GB of data to this drive is painfully slow because it appears it does the transfer over the network.
Another big thing is that I can now connect my printer to my iMac and be able to print over the network to it from my MacBook Pro (since they are both on the wireless network created by the Time Capsule). I would have preferred to connect it directly to the Time Capsule, but the single USB port is better used for my Time Machine backup drive.
Overall, my first impressions of the device are very positive. The older generation is a very capable device and although I wish I could get the brand new 2TB version, this is not a bad consolation by any stretch.