Pat’s Point of View

OK enough is enough. I have finally ditched my Maxtor Shared Storage II NAS drive which I had so much trouble with. I was sick of it screwing up, but mostly I was sick of not being confident that my data was secure.

So today, after getting a refund for the Maxtor, I went and bought an Apple Time Capsule (500GB) from the new Apple Store in Sydney. (As an aside isn’t it weird how you can walk out of there with an item and no receipt—because I asked for it to be emailed to me instead—and nobody stops to question you?)

I’ve read lots of negative reviews from disapointed customers, but I reckon it’s the Time Machine backup functionality that most people are having trouble. For what I need it for, I think the Time Capsule (TC) will be just fine. Not only do I get what I hope will be a more reliable piece of network storage but I get Wifi “n” and gigabit ethernet, and my Macs should talk to it nicely (something the Maxtor and my old wifi router never did that well).

And so it was, pumped up on cold and flu drugs, I sat down this afternoon with my new toy, hoping for a pleasant setup experience. Setting up the TC itself was easy, and getting the machines to see and use the network disk was straightforward too. However when it came to getting the router to work with my ADSL modem, a few issues popped up. I remembered how I hated getting my old wireless router (Netgear WGR614v4) to talk to the modem (D-Link 300G+). But with some time and experimentation I found that putting the modem into bridge mode and giving my PPPoE details to the TC, gets it working nicely.

Now I just need to get my archives files onto the TC, not such an easy task when it’s a 200GB zip file. I’ll figure out some way.

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