Refurb 2TB Time Capsule

[drbrock]

Just bought one($199) from Apple and being shipped now.

Horrible decision or great move? I have bought expensive routers before and all of them constantly needed to be resetted or some other stupid thing. I was in the market for a new wireless router since I switched to Uverse and did not have an ac one laying around.

I am not very good with home networking. Still have never been able to get Plex to work in my house lol.

I know Apple ac wireless is not the pinnacle of the bunch but I just want something that works. I currently have an iphone, ipad, pc laptop and desktop. Goal is to be able to save an image of my current desktop that has my business documents on it. So when the hard drive fails I can just reimage another one.

 

[Sushisamurai]

... I think time capsules were one of the things you never bought refurbished, as it's not the router that usually has the issue, but the hard drive within the time capsule.

From what i've read online in the past, when the time capsule hard drive fails, you generally tend to lose all your info, with recovery of it being an expensive or time consuming ordeal (hard to access, recover, etc etc). As for time machine, you can do that with any external hard drive. I suppose you could also be redundant with your time machine, as you should with any physical media for backups, so it's not a huge issue if u have some redundancy. Otherwise, apple's wireless router's aren't bad - simplistic interface and features, but I find that they work well and are easy to configure. Have fun.

 

[Rakehellion]

Mechanical hard drives fail, but it's just a backup device so you're writing to it maybe 1% as often as your main drive. Also, it is just a backup drive so if it fails you still have your main drive. That's the whole point of backups.

 

[scannall]

Apple routers are great. I've had an Airport Extreme running for years. Never fails, never has to be restarted. Easy to setup and install as well.

 

[Don Vito Corleone]

Mechanical hard drives fail, but it's just a backup device so you're writing to it maybe 1% as often as your main drive. Also, it is just a backup drive so if it fails you still have your main drive. That's the whole point of backups.

Agree. The thing about Time Machine is that a TM backup is a backup of your main drive, but your main drive is, in turn, a backup of your most recent TM backup. That redundancy can go both ways.

I actually bought a first-gen Time Machine and sold it to a member here after it cratered (he knew it was dead). He took it to the Apple Store and got a new one with more storage for free despite the fact that it was long out of warranty and he was not the original purchaser. Say what you will about Apple, they take care of customers who buy products with known issues, warranty be damned.

 

[KeithP]

Ever since the "tower" base stations came out, Apple has officially supported using a HD connected to the base station USB port for Time Machine. It is much easier to deal with a dead drive when it's outside of the device. You can backup the Time Capsule to an external HD through the USB port which is a nice way to make a copy to take off site, good protection against a HD failure.

My experience with base stations are that they are extremely reliable. However, the three people I know that have Time Capsules experience the same problem from time to time, Time Machine loses connection to the Time Capsule drive requiring a restart of the Mac or sometimes the Time Capsule. These were the old style devices, the flat kind, not the current models.

This doesn't happen a lot, just enough to be mildly annoying. Hopefully the current models are better.

-KeithP

 

[Ichinisan]

Apple routers are great. I've had an Airport Extreme running for years. Never fails, never has to be restarted.

This.

Easy to setup and install as well.

Not this. You have to have the Airport Utility because there is no web based setup. I guess that's not a big deal, but you might have to download / install it. The Windows Utility doesn't properly support the latest 802.11ac devices, so you will need to have a Mac or an iOS device set up properly.

I don't have a Mac or anything running OSX, so I had to use the Windows Airport Utility to manage my 5th gen Airport Extreme. I now have a 6th-gen 802.11ac Airport Extreme, but the Windows utility was never updated past 5.6.1 and doesn't even seem to realize the router is 802.11ac. I'm afraid to make changes using that utility (will it corrupt settings?). That just leaves the Airport Utility for iOS. Well, the iOS utility can't remotely log-in. It simply has no way to specify an IP or hostname for a router to administer remotely. I have to be on the LAN behind the router to do anything at all.

I very often need to experiment from work, so I would have to use Windows Remote Desktop to get to my Windows PC and then use the Airport Utility for Windows to change settings (I don't want to do that anymore, now that the Windows version is outdated). Often, I would experiment with port forwarding while trying to help someone else configure theirs. A slight screw-up could cause me to lose remote access to my PC. Then I can't access my router any more to fix those settings until I get back home to my LAN.

Compared to all the other routers I've ever experienced (dozens), remote administration is a nightmare. Or perhaps that's only if you don't have a Mac running OSX everywhere you go. I'm assuming it's not a nightmare if you do have a Mac. I really can't say for sure because I still haven't been able to try it. I just don't have access to a Mac away from home.

Of course, this will not be an issue for 99.7% of owners. Most won't have any interest in remote administration. Some will probably have a Macbook or other Mac at work.

 

[Emulex]

Well compared to other options, most routers have had remote-access backdoors throughout the years!

And time capsules are the damn most reliable devices ever! I've got a time-capsule serving 50 wifi clients all day, plus an airport extreme wifi extended hung off it, and it never needs rebooting!

I wish i could say the same for *.WRT - talk about a nightmare to deal with!