Help Me Help You – Get Time Capsule Now!

IF YOU USE A MAC, I HOPE YOU READ THIS. For those of you on Windows, ummmm….. good luck with that.

time-machine-icon.jpg

Hey Mac-using folks –

I *really* *really* want you to buy a Time Capsule or start using Time Machine. No, Apple doesn’t need the money. No, I don’t get a cut or even work on the Time Capsule team.

I ask you to do this because I care about you. And specifically, because I know the horrors of data loss. Think of all the music in your iTunes library, or all the photos in your iPhoto library, or all those things you’ve written, or all those emails that you want to save. Some day your hard drive will die. Or you’ll drop your Mac. Or something else bad will happen. And on that day you will either say:

  1. I’m glad ‘Deep made me buy a Time Capsule.
  2. F$&^k, I wish I listened to ‘Deep and bought a Time Capsule.

So what am I talking about?

– The new MacOS X Leopard has a feature called Time Machine. It is a really cool “you never have to think about it after you turn it on” back up service that will automatically save your work, hourly, daily, and monthly. It also makes it super easy to retrieve things from the past and even kinda FUN to do so. All Time Machine needs to silently and constantly save-your-ass is an external hard drive (they’re pretty cheap1 these days) just plug it in to your Mac & turn on Time Machine & point it at the drive. Done. Ass saved.

– If you use a laptop, like most of us, things get slightly more complicated: though you could use Time Machine and just remember to plug in a hard drive periodically so Time Machine could do its thing, I know you won’t. I know I won’t. That is where Time Capsule comes in. Time Capsule is a new Apple WiFi (Airport) Base Station with a big hard drive built in. It is designed to be used with Time Machine, but you never have to plug it in to your Mac. It will just work quietly in the background and wirelessly be saving your ass once an hour all the time. It is also a nice WiFi base station – so you can replace your older WiFi base station with the latest tech and better range all in one fell swoop. And, if you are a multiple Mac household, it will back up all your Macs – nice. Also the quality of the hard drive in a Time Capsule will probably make it much less prone to hard drive failure than a lot of drives that you would buy for yourself.

Leopard costs $129. A Time Capsule costs $299. They are worth it. Trust me.2

I really really hope some of you take me up on this. I honestly think this is important. Most of us have tons of stuff that means so much to us on our computers. This is the best way to guard against the data loss that is inevitably coming. I hate to be a fear-monger. But hard drive loss/failure is honestly inevitable. I can’t guarantee that you won’t ever lose something from your computer, but with Time Machine / Time Capsule your risks are seriously reduced.

Help me help you 🙂
‘deep

1Hard drives are cheap in the literal sense – you can find them as low as $125 for 500 GB, but compared to the value of your data they are INSANELY cheap.↩

2Through a combination of idiocy, inability to have nice things, and bad luck, I’ve destroyed 3 main hard drives in the past year. Luckily I had backups because I was already backing up with the excellent SuperDuper!↩

Update: 6/17/10 – fixed minor typos & grammar problems.

One thought on “Help Me Help You – Get Time Capsule Now!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *