The box would be empty except for the memory

[austin_dern]

So I got my Time Capsule home and ready to set up, which ... actually, I wasn't quite sure how to set it up. Yes, there are clear instructions about it, but I'm not the sort of person who can take something like ``plug your computer in to the Time Capsule by an Ethernet cable for the initial configuration'' without finding unacceptable ambiguities in just what it is I'm expected to do and locating some way in which to feel I'm doing it incorrectly. I couldn't even find my Ethernet cable. It was plugged in to the wireless modem base station from when my mother was using it to connect her computer to the Internet while its wireless was turned off. (Remember that anecdote?)

There was an installation disk, of course, although I'm not sure that it actually installed anything which wasn't there already, and I was left a bit unsure to whether it was better to have my Time Capsule create its own wireless network or to just join the wireless network that already exists. It can serve as a base station, but I didn't want this to replace my parents' modem because if I had my Time Capsule take its place I would have to explain to my parents how to redo their wireless configurations, which would take roughly all the time remaining in the universe.

So I set to work waiting for the first grand copy of my whole hard drive, which was ... something like 49 Gigabytes. Very swiftly we moved to the first couple of 779,000 or so files copied and ... it didn't seem to really be going all that fast. The instructions warn the first backup may take the overnight, so I slept on it, and got done to see one gigabyte was copied over. After some deliberation I cancelled and told it to just copy my home directory, on the theory that the stuff which comes directly from Operating System installation disks I didn't need hard drive backups for. And so with a mere 11 Gigabytes (somehow) of stuff I resumed the copy and ...

Two days later I had got to 2.8 Gigabytes copied over, and over the course of six hours saw that go up to a mere 3.1 Gigabytes.

With a bit of web searching I found useful advice: while it's not necessary to reboot the computer and do the first transfer by Ethernet, it turns out to help, and indeed it did. This time around the whole hard drive was copied while I slept, and since then I've had the slightly amusing sight of once an hour a new hard drive popping up on my computer and, I assume, copying all the changed stuff. I feel so vaguely safe, I hope.

Trivia: The $64,000 Question debuted 7 June 1955; it replaced the CBS dramatic anthology Danger. Source: Quiz Craze, Thomas A DeLong.

Currently Reading: Worlds of Maybe, Editor Robert Silverberg.

Comments

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I think if I keep doing my backups once a day, I should be pretty happy and not lose too much precious stuff in the event of another catastrophe.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

That would probably do just fine for me too, particularly since my mail servers have gone from POP3 to Whatever That Other Scheme Is. Even now I'll sometimes without meaning to get a full backup of the past two days' mail in my box, so getting a copy of stuff from the past day wouldn't be too bad. I'd have to re-write whatever files I edited in the previous day, but that's always a potential peril of menace anyway.

[patchoblack.livejournal.com]

I am interested to see if you find Time Capsule worth the price and up to the hype.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, to be honest, I'd kind of prefer to discover four years down the line that it was a couple of hundred dollars never put to the test and that for all my need I could have spent the money on the Get Smart series DVD set instead.

[captpackrat.livejournal.com]

And here I thought Vista was being sucky for taking 10 hours to copy 2 Gigs.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

The curious thing is before the reboot it seemed to copy things over faster when I was downloading something else online, as if it didn't quite know it was allowed to use the connection by itself.

Once I did reboot, though, the transfer was much better; a couple minutes, I guess, for each 100 megabytes. Reasonable speeds if you're used to YouTube stuff.