VARs Delight in Apple's Doubling of Time Capsule Capacity

Apple's new 2-Tbyte version of its Time Capsule wireless backup appliance, which the company released earlier this week, is proving a welcome addition to the line for Apple solution providers and dealers.

Apple has quietly released an updated version of its Time Capsule featuring a 2-Tbyte hard drive and has priced it at $499, the same as its earlier 1-Tbyte model. At the same time, Apple has dropped the price of its 1-Tbyte Time Capsule to $299.

Unlike most backup appliances in the market, the Time Capsule features a built-in AirPort Extreme wireless router, making the device useful not only for backing up data via a wireless connection, but also as the center of a small home wireless network.

The backups are done automatically when the Time Capsule is designated as the backup drive for Apple's Time Machine software, which comes with the Mac OS X Leopard.

It was a great move by Apple to double the capacity of the appliance without increasing the price, said Eric Potts, a sales rep at ComputerTree, a Winston-Salem, N.C.-based Apple reseller and one of only two Apple specialist in North Carolina.

The Time Capsule has turned out to be a no-brainer for customers with multiple Apple computers in the same home, as they can connect those computers to the Time Capsule wirelessly and have backups done automatically.

The alternative, Potts said, was to connect an external hard drive or do backups over the Internet. However, he said, people don't always do backups as often as they should.

The only time the Time Capsule could slow down customers is when they have to backup a lot of data at one time, in which case they could use up the available bandwidth, Potts said. "But for 90 percent of customers, it's a great device," he said.

The Time Capsule appliance has also proven itself in professional environments, said Chris Donoyan, president of HomeRun Media, a Los Angeles-based solution provider with customers in the media and entertainment industry.

Studios have been using the Time Capsule as a way to backup everything but large video files, and many of their users take their Time Capsule home at night as a low-cost way to make sure their data is available in case of a disaster at the office, Donoyan said.

Their alternative would be to use an online storage solution. But with hundreds of files each with capacities of between 5 Mbytes and 20 Mbytes, such a solution would be too slow, Donoyan said.

Freelancers working in the broadcast industry also like to use a Time Capsule not only for storing and moving data, but as a way to get wireless Wi-Fi access in places where such access is not normally available, Donoyan said.

"When they plug a Time Capsule into their client's network, they get wireless access for their iPhone," he said. "A lot of these companies don't like wireless access because of security."

One customer also uses its Time Capsule appliance for streaming low-bandwidth versions of new videos wirelessly to an iPhone, Donoyan said. "They use it to let managers see over an iPhone how the videos are progressing during the editing process," he said.